‘Citation needed’: reliable and unreliable sources
Australia barely figured in Japanese plans for the war. Japanese writers who advocated Japan’s expansion to meet her destiny in the ‘Southern Area’ mentioned Australia’s natural wealth, of course, but no official war plans late in 1941 proposed any offensive action against the Australian mainland. According to the latest authoritative translations of the Japanese official histories, the ‘Plan for facilitating the end of the war with the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Chiang Kai-shek’, adopted in mid-November 1941, was to ‘destroy US, British, and Dutch bases in east Asia and the south-west Pacific’.1 This would entail operations against the Philippines, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, Borneo and Timor. In these campaigns, as we have seen, thousands of Australians were killed, wounded or captured: about a quarter of Australia’s deaths for the entire war can be attributed to the defeats of 1941–42. But none of these plans envisaged operations directly against Australia.
At the time, almost all Australians believed that Japan’s objective was Australia. Coming as it did on top of years of sombre predictions, this was entirely realistic and understandable. The evidence of the newspaper maps showing Japan’s progress – with arrows moving seemingly inexorably towards Australia’s northern coast – seemed to substantiate that impression. But we need to be careful not to accept without question what has been widely put about. Let’s look at popular works that have taken the idea of invasion as read.
It is widely believed that either Admiral Yamamoto Isoruku (the planner of Pearl Harbor attack) or General Yamashita Tomoyuki (the victor of Singapore) proposed an immediate invasion of Australia. According to a popular website among enthusiasts, Yamashita was to advance down the north–south track to Adelaide, cutting the continent in two – all with two divisions.2 Many proponents of the invasion idea cite this ‘plan’ and it has become widely accepted as the truth. The entry ‘Planned invasion of Australia’ in Wikipedia (a self-policed organic web encyclopaedia) used to read: ‘General Tomoyuki Yamashita agreed with Yamamoto’s Invasion Plan and even volunteered to lead the invasion. However, the plan was opposed by Tojo, as he believed that there were no contingency plans considered.’3 The source of this view deserves some attention. It is David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, a secondary source widely regarded as questionable by scholars – ‘journalistic and unscholarly’ seems to sum up the standard view.4 Bergamini’s massive book, which argues that Japan waged an aggressive war at the bidding of the emperor, devotes just one reference to the idea of invading Australia. An American, Bergamini spent five weeks researching in Australia, and consulted thousands of sources, all of which he lists exhaustively. In a volume that catalogues the actual and projected actions and atrocities of the Japanese wartime regime, would he not have mentioned a plan for Australia’s invasion had one existed? Wikipedia’s entry was peppered with the notation (added by sceptics) ‘citation needed’. None of the several biographies of Yamashita mention his alleged invasion plan, although they do make clear that Tojo feared him as a rival and posted the victor of Singapore to Manchuria.5
Apart from Bergamini’s book, another widely mentioned source is the 1927 Tanaka Memorial, which was circulating in Militia circles in the late 1930s, and was distributed within the army in 1940–41.6 One of the ‘Hate campaign’s’ broadcasts dealt with the memorial (‘Japan’s Mein Kampf’, as 1942 pamphlets described it).7 This document is worth further examination, because it still crops up in discussions of Japan’s ambitions as ‘proof’ of its intentions. The broadcast’s script described the memorial – a petition to the emperor – as the ‘blueprint for Japan’s drive for conquest of the Pacific and East Asian areas’ and, it added, ‘more’.
On the one hand, the Tanaka Memorial had no official standing and cannot be taken as giving any support to the idea that the Japanese planned to invade Australia. As we have seen, the memorial did not actually refer to invading Australia at all. On the other, it reflects the kind of ambition backed by force that Japan’s rulers held, and suggests the nature of the regime that the Allies confronted. No one of a liberal persuasion would agree that the Japanese were benign; but the Tanaka Memorial does not constitute evidence that the Japanese harboured any specific intention to invade Australia at the time. It contributed to the atmosphere of apprehension that permeated Australia in 1942. This is understandable: Allied commanders remained in the dark, inferring and guessing what the Japanese might do next.
‘Immediate Danger of Invasion in Force’: Allied appreciations
As the Japanese advance gathered momentum in January 1942 Australia’s War Cabinet received through the chiefs of staff, its main military advisors, a succession of briefings and ‘appreciations’. They progressively forecast what the Japanese might do based on Allied estimates of their strength and capabilities. Traditionally there was only one way of knowing an enemy’s secret intentions: putting yourself in their shoes, inferring what they might do and looking for signs of movement. At each end of the Pacific Ocean, senior officers looked at maps and consulted tables showing their own and probable enemy forces, calculated steaming times and the tonnages that would be required to carry and supply forces of various sizes, and measured the range of the aircraft they would need. Because military reasoning is based on similar physical considerations (and even more so the iron rules of logistics – you cannot inspire a fuel tank to hold more than its capacity) the Japanese and Australian–American staffs in Tokyo and Melbourne came up with pretty much the same estimate of Japan’s plan.
In January the Australian chiefs of staff thought that the attack on Malaya ‘might well be the first stage in the Japanese plan for a major attack on Australia’.8 By February, based on what the Japanese had achieved, they reasonably supposed that Australia lay under ‘immediate Danger of Invasion in Force’. They advised the War Cabinet accordingly, prompting alarm and consternation. Frank Forde, the army minister, urged Curtin to appeal to Canada and the United States for 50 000, later 100 000, troops. This, he thought, would provide a ‘wonderful tonic to the morale of the Australian people’ (and, it would seem, of the War Cabinet, which was clearly rattled by the chiefs’ advice).9
The worsening situation in South-East Asia demanded a ‘fresh appreciation’ late in February. This time the chiefs saw several possibilities: the Japanese might merely consolidate their gains; move east towards India; or attempt to take Australia and New Zealand. They expected an attack by two divisions on Darwin by early April – could this be the source of the mythical Yamashita option?10 By the first week of March the War Cabinet was logging daily situation reports and watching movements across the arc of coast from Perth to Brisbane, but especially wary of the possibility of landings in north-east Queensland and the Northern Territory. The chiefs anticipated ‘probable immediate Japanese moves’. They thought a landing around Darwin could come – though not in less than a month – but if the Japanese were to take New Caledonia, an attack on Australia’s east coast could be made by May.11
Late in March 1942 the Joint Planning Staff examined the ‘entire situation’, pondering Japanese options. Planners bemoaned the ‘meagre intelligence’ they had access to. They did not know where Japanese forces were, let alone where they might be in the coming months. What they did was examine the most feasible worst-case scenario. They conjectured that the Japanese could land two divisions around Darwin and up to three in north Queensland. The Japanese had ten aircraft carriers, they thought, although only one of these was close to north-east Australia, and there was no sign in Rabaul or Truk of the seventy-odd transports and warships the operation would need. Although the chiefs were loath to dilute the ‘vital Sector’ of Brisbane to Melbourne, they recommended that the force around Townsville be tripled from a brigade to a division. While by this time the planners thought that an attack on north Queensland could conceivably arrive by mid-April, they did not think it likely.12 In April the Combined Operational Intelligence Centre advised that Japanese moves against Australia were unlikely because they lacked both merchant ships and escorts.13
The American official war historian, Samuel Milner, discussed the Japanese plans in his volume Victory in Papua. Milner wrote that ‘profound differences of opinion’ existed between General George Brett (the American commander in Australia) and the Australian chiefs of staff, particularly Syd Rowell, the deputy chief of the General Staff.14 Alarmed by Japanese forces in Java and the surrounding islands, Brett was sure that the Japanese would invade Australia from the north-west – and that meant Darwin. Rowell reasoned that if the Japanese attacked Darwin at all, their aim would be to prevent its use by the Allies as a base from which to attack, rather than to use it as a stepping stone for the invasion of Australia. The Australian chiefs of staff argued that the Japanese object was to ‘cut the air and shipping lines of communication between United States and Australia with a view to preventing the development of Australia as a base for eventual offensive operations’. They thought that the Japanese could best achieve this aim by occupying islands to Australia’s north-east, especially New Caledonia and Fiji. This, as it turned out, was a shrewd stab at what the Japanese had actually decided to do, although no Allied officer could have known why.
When MacArthur arrived in Australia, he applied his considerable authority to the scales. His earliest appreciations followed the pattern of those of British and American staffs in London and Washington. MacArthur implied that while Australia’s leaders were in a quandary, he had a strategy – of offensive action in his theatre (but mere holding elsewhere) – that would bring victory. At his first appearance at the Advisory War Council on 26 March he told government and opposition ministers that he doubted the Japanese would invade, because ‘the spoils were not sufficient to warrant the risk’.15 He thought the Japanese ‘might try to overrun Australia’, not necessarily for sound strategic reasons but – harking back to the White Australia policy – ‘to demonstrate their superiority over the white races’.16 The Advisory War Council was little reassured.
It is vital to understand the situation of those responsible for discerning Japan’s intentions in those dark months. Most intelligence officers had little hard evidence to go on. They made estimates and tentative predictions from snippets and hints, from traces of which Japanese formations were where, by inferring what the Japanese might possibly do from what they seemed to be doing. But what were their Japanese counterparts actually discussing and deciding?
‘Risky and fanciful’: Japanese staff officers ask, ‘Where next?’
In November 1941 Japan’s leaders (essentially Premier Tojo Hideki and senior commanders of the army and navy) had decided on war, and on a ‘Phase 1’ plan they hoped would destroy the American Pacific Fleet and seize the American, British and Dutch colonial empires. These defeats would, they believed, demoralise their enemies (especially the Americans, whom they considered ‘effete’) and induce them to seek a negotiated peace. Weak Western governments, they thought, could not prevail against a Japanese ‘fighting spirit’. ‘Do not worry about deficiency of strength or of material,’ a Japanese general had urged in the mid-1930s, ‘everything depends on spirit. Spirit solves all.’17
Some Japanese commanders knew that ‘spirit’, however useful in battle, was no counterweight for industrial production. They knew that Japan needed to reach a quick, decisive result before the United States’ superior industrial power prevailed. The United States would inevitably out-produce Japan, even given the wealth of raw materials it could gather from its conquered territories. Soon enough, in March and April 1942, the American aircraft carrier force would launch counter-strikes against Japan, on Lae and Salamaua in March, and spectacularly against Tokyo itself in April.
Still, in the heady opening months of the Pacific War, before the fall of Singapore, Japan’s forces seemed to do no wrong. When it looked that the war was going well, Japanese staff officers at Imperial General Headquarters naturally asked, ‘Where next?’ Some answered, ‘Australia.’ Neville Meaney writes in his popular history Towards a New Vision, ‘the Navy General Staff wanted … to mount an invasion of Australia, but the Army General Staff … firmly opposed the idea.’18 It is important to grasp that the entire naval staff did not argue for invasion. Rather, it was some elements within the navy. No plans were being made, still less accepted, by ‘the Japanese’, but simply proposed by some ambitious staff officers.
Hedley Willmott makes this point in his detailed book The Barrier and the Javelin. The Japanese services argued constantly, with no clear direction from a single strategic body. In the navy, operational commanders and their staff officers often clashed with the Navy Ministry over operational directions. Contrary to the popular impression of forces ruled by authoritarian commanders, as the ‘incidents’ in China showed, junior officers often proposed ideas and even acted unilaterally. Japan’s future directions in early 1942 arose from both the navy’s General Headquarters and the powerful Combined Fleet. The Combined Fleet commander, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, had insisted on the Pearl Harbor attack over the reservations of the General Staff. Japanese naval aviators who chronicled these debates remembered the divisions victory caused. The successes of the war’s first months gave the Combined Fleet staff an ‘elated self-confidence’, what has been called ‘victory disease’. Navy General Staff officers ‘felt constrained to talk softly’.19 The two were to fall out over the direction of Japan’s next moves, and ‘victory disease’ led some to make unrealistic proposals, including attacks on Australia.
In early January – before the fall of Rabaul, Singapore, Manila or Batavia – the navy’s senior commanders began to look ahead. Rear Admiral Ugaki Matome, chief of staff to the Combined Fleet, began to identify possible future directions. He spent several days pondering the possibilities. Ukagi saw four options. The Japanese could simply hold what they had taken (or would soon seize), or they could advance westwards against India, southwards to Australia, or eastwards to Hawaii.
Ugaki favoured an attack on Hawaii, the main base of Japan’s principal Pacific enemy. Meanwhile, the navy staff had not been idle. It happened that both the chief of the Navy General Staff and his deputy disliked directing their subordinates unduly. They preferred to pronounce on plans devised by junior officers – captains and commanders – rather than direct them from the outset. This attitude encouraged initiative (again confounding preconceptions about the Japanese approach) but it also produced friction. Captain Tomioka Sadatoshi headed the Plans Division of the Operations Section. His concern was not that Australia’s military forces posed a threat, but that America would use Australia as a base. In December he had already proposed the capture of bases in northern Australia – Darwin at least. As Japan’s forces won victories so easily, he thought that some points in north-east Queensland might be useful, partly to help cut America’s supply lines, but mainly to demoralise Australia and force it to give in.20
Tomioka advanced an idea that navy staff officers had been mulling over for months. His proposal obviously drew upon both the general impressions current in Japanese geographical and economic literature about Australia’s value, and probably also on the massive espionage effort in which the navy especially had invested. Tomioka recognised what American officers saw at exactly the same time, that Australia gave the Allies a secure base from which to launch their inevitable counteroffensives.
The Army General Staff rejected Tomioka’s ambitious proposal, swiftly and firmly. On 6 January, Major General Tanaka Shin’ichi, Tomioka’s counterpart in the army’s Operations Section, argued, ‘it overextends the Pacific periphery.’ The naval plan, Tanaka warned, would lengthen, not end the war: it was ‘risky and fanciful’ to attempt even limited landings in Australia.21 Over maps, loading tables and manuals, staff officers undertook the laborious calculations required for any military operation. They concluded that an invasion of northern Australia would need three divisions. An invasion of the south-eastern states would need ten to twelve. (To put this in context, Japan had used nine divisions to conquer the whole of South-East Asia.) This force would need between 1.5 and 2 million tons of shipping to transport them there. ‘We expended much effort restraining Navy’s simplistic … dash to Australia,’ the army’s Imperial Headquarters war diary recorded.22
Army officers forcibly reminded their naval counterparts that the point of conquering South-East Asia was to carry its resources back to Japan. If a ship transported troops to Townsville it could not carry rubber to Japan. An Australian venture would develop into a ‘profitless war of attrition’, and Japan already had one such war in China.23 Above all, the Soviet threat preoccupied the army – troops fighting in Sydney could not go to Siberia if war with the Soviet Union broke out.
Again, it is important for Australians not to imagine that Imperial Headquarters argued for weeks just over Australia’s fate. In late January, Yamamoto’s staff advanced its own agenda: invading Ceylon (envisaging a link with victorious German forces in the Middle East); landing at Darwin; denying Fiji and Samoa to the Allies; and then taking Hawaii. This time navy staff opposed the plan, exposing a rift within the Combined Fleet staffs over whether the navy needed to take or merely neuter Darwin. Henry Frei summarised the debate, noting, ‘about the only thing all three [sic] services could agree to with regard to Australia was the destruction of Darwin – ironically, because it had nothing to do with an invasion.’24
By early February – still before the fall of Singapore – the argument between the services became ugly. The Navy Ministry weighed in to the debate, supporting Tomioka’s ambitious plan. Captain Ishikawa Shingo lectured the army’s representatives that there could be no security for the Co-Prosperity Sphere ‘unless we make Australia the main target … and annihilate it as a base for an American counteroffensive’.25 Again, the army disagreed, wary of the commitment to Japan’s major war in China and the danger of another war with the Soviet Union.
The day before Singapore capitulated, the Japanese staff officers came together once more to thrash out an argument that had been going nowhere for six weeks. Again Tomioka urged the soldiers to boldness (‘With only a token force we can reach our aim!’) only to face stonewalling again. The Imperial Headquarters recording officer (presumably a soldier) described the navy’s arguments as ‘so much gibberish’.26
Late in February, senior army and navy officers realised that they had to intervene and resolve the squabble. While they acknowledged that Australia would be used as a base, they deprecated the possibility of taking and holding so large a continent. On the one hand it was ‘useless for us to plan for an invasion of only part of Australia’, and on the other seizing only part of the country would ‘surely develop into a war of attrition’ that (as in China) Japan could not win. As a compromise, both the army and the navy accepted plan ‘FS’, to isolate Australia by seizing the island chain of Fiji–Samoa–New Caledonia to Australia’s north-east. By early March the acrimonious discussions had produced an ill-fitting compromise in a ‘Fundamental outline of recommendations for future war leadership’ submitted to the emperor on 17 March. Invasion of Australia – and then only a ‘temporary invasion of Port Darwin’ – was relegated to a ‘future option’. As Henry Frei wrote, ‘in reality, this meant little more than “never”.’27
‘Magic’: code-breaking and Japan’s intentions
Establishing what the Japanese thought and decided is essential. But when did the Allies know what Japan’s intentions were? Here, remarkable technological and intellectual developments had given the Allies a massive, arguably overwhelming advantage. Through a succession of heroic efforts by generous and brave Poles and some very brainy chaps in huts at Bletchley Park in Britain and in Hawaii, British and American boffins were able to read various German and Japanese codes. The resultant intelligence they called, for obvious reasons, ‘Magic’, or ‘Ultra’ (as in ‘ultra-secret’).
The difficulty of the code-breakers’ task is staggering. Imperial Headquarters sent some 500 messages a day, each army headquarters up to 230, and air and naval units many of their own, routine and administrative signals mixed up with the significant and revealing. All were sent in a complex code in a complex language, with ample room for misunderstanding and error. The wonder is that the code-breakers learned anything worthwhile in time. Magic could lead analysts wildly astray.
In April the US Navy intercept unit in Hawaii told MacArthur’s headquarters that, based on Magic intercepts, the Japanese were planning an amphibious move against Port Moresby (which they were – the action led to the Battle of the Coral Sea). But in Melbourne, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby read the very same messages and reached a different conclusion. He noticed that the Japanese force included four aircraft carriers and surmised – incorrectly, as it happened – that they were planning to seize an objective out of range of land-based aircraft (that is, bombers based at Rabaul). Drawing a circle on a map from Rabaul, he reasoned that this suggested that the operation’s objective was north-east Queensland or perhaps New Caledonia, as part of the Japanese strategy to isolate Australia. A week later Willoughby changed his mind and punted for the Port Moresby operation. The point is that even MacArthur’s intelligence chief, with all the highest levels of intelligence – signals that few Australians saw – could read the course of the war wrongly. Ed Drea, the doyen of Japanese intelligence in the Pacific War, puts it succinctly: ‘rarely were the enemy’s intentions self-evident.’28
Diplomatic signals corroborated the code-breaking efforts. In April 1942 Allied code-breakers picked up the Japanese ambassador to Madrid’s signal to Tokyo in which he acknowledged, ‘Japan’s operation in near future is Indian Ocean and not Australia.’29 It seems that this message did not reach Allied leaders in Australia, but other intelligence did. Australian and Allied leaders in Australia knew of the Japanese decision not to invade within a month of the debates between staff officers in Tokyo in March 1942. In mid-April, Magic intercepts that reached Australia confirmed that no invasion was contemplated. This intelligence certainly reached Curtin, Shedden and, of course, MacArthur, the three of whom constituted the Prime Minister’s War Conference, the key executive body governing the Australian war effort.30 Signals that reached MacArthur through the Fleet Radio Unit in Melbourne made it clear that the Japanese had decided not to invade Australia.31 Curtin was told as much by London and Washington, and MacArthur and Blamey, Curtin’s principal strategic advisers, consistently expressed the view that it was improbable.
The recommendations made by bad-tempered staff officers in Tokyo in February 1942 effectively ended Japanese discussion about a possible invasion. But while MacArthur and a few of his staff knew, few other officers or ministers did – and among Australians perhaps only Blamey, Shedden and Curtin. As a result, lower level officers continued, quite properly, to plan and prepare for the possibility that the Japanese might yet come, somewhere, in some way. After all, the Japanese might change their plans, or they might opportunistically capitalise on events. In September 1942 it was reasonable for the Australian chiefs of staff to submit another ‘appreciation’ warning that to send more troops to Papua (where the Australians were still retreating from Kokoda) could ‘dangerously deplete’ Australia’s defences. They counselled that a major Japanese naval victory in the Pacific could still lead to an ‘attack nearer to the main centres of population in the south’.32
Japanese interest in Australia continued nevertheless. In 1942 a book appeared in Tokyo entitled Goshu Shinryakushi (A History of the Invasion of Australia). It dealt with the invaders who displaced the continent’s original inhabitants. Another, Goshu no Shizen to Shakai (Natural Resources and Society in Australia), included a chapter analysing the Australian devotion to sport and leisure under the title ‘Paradise of Fools’.33 In the paradise of fools, as 1942 continued, it became apparent that invasion would not come. Though official announcements, publicity and propaganda continued to stress the possibility, the invasion crisis ended with a series of battles in the Pacific in the year’s second half. The army acted as if the crisis had ended. By the year’s end it ordered the reduction of static anti-aircraft defences everywhere south of Cairns and Geraldton ‘as soon as possible’.34 But if in the course of 1942 invasion passed from an imminent threat to a remote possibility and then an impossibility, Australians generally have never grasped or accepted that invasion was not going to happen. Indeed, they have cherished a belief that invasion was actually planned, a conviction based largely on the existence of ‘invasion money’.
‘Banana money’: invasion currency and what it doesn’t prove
Alice Cay modestly recalled, ‘nothing exciting happened to me during the war.’ Then she described life in wartime Essendon. Married to a draughtsman at the Maribyrnong munitions factory, she claimed that her ‘one little special war effort’ was to grow vegetables in her backyard – that and bear three children. Her life involved the dull, repetitive, invisible hardship of a wartime housewife – pushing a pram loaded with groceries, queuing for everything, making do and mending. Once, though, the war intruded shockingly. While pegging out the washing she watched, horrified, as an American bomber crashed on landing on the runway at nearby Essendon Airport. Almost as an afterthought to her memoir, she added that ‘when it was all over’ a friend gave her ‘some Japanese invasion money … cheap paper money,’ she explained, ‘for use when they invaded Australia’. More than forty years later she wrote, ‘I still have it; thank goodness I never had to use it.’35 Thank goodness indeed. But Alice was under what remains perhaps the single most widespread delusion about Australia and the Pacific War.
Invasion money became for my work on the Battle for Australia what I had come to call the ‘rum question’ when I had written For Fear of Pain, a book about surgery before anaesthesia. While writing that book, I gave a dozen or more talks and papers. At every single one, someone would ask, ‘But didn’t surgeons give patients rum to deaden the pain?’ The answer is that surgeons administered alcohol as a ‘cordial’, a stimulant, to bring round patients who had fainted – the technical term is ‘syncope’ – during operations, not before the operation to drug or fortify them. Why did this question come up every time? I came to realise that it was because in imagining what operations without anaesthesia were like – and I left them in no doubt about how awful they were for all involved – people wanted to believe that there was something that surgeons could have done to ameliorate the pain. In fact, there was nothing to be done. (Many listeners also asked about ‘biting on bullets’: that was a myth as well.)
When discussing the Battle for Australia someone would invariably bring up the ‘invasion money’ as ‘proof’ that the Japanese had planned so seriously to invade Australia that they printed in advance millions of banknotes, supposedly bearing the inscription ‘The Japanese Government of Australia’. Why did it come up every time? Because the invasion money has been mentioned over and over in conversation and commentary, and in the popular literature that supports the idea that invasion would have occurred. In Who Sank the Sydney?, for example, Michael Montgomery uses ‘invasion money’ as the capstone in a chapter presenting hearsay and second-hand evidence of ‘Japan’s plans for invading Australia’. The note he uses to illustrate this, needless to say, was not intended for use in Australia.
When the Japanese conquered the European colonial empires of South-East Asia, they stamped their identity upon their new possessions by replacing colonial currency. Millions of notes were printed between 1942 and 1945, right across South-East Asia.
The Japanese central bank produced banknotes, printed on poor-quality paper, in currencies of all the imperial powers whose territories they conquered. These include pesos in the Philippines, dollars in Malaya and Singapore, guilders in the Netherlands East Indies, rupees in Burma and pounds in Papua, New Guinea and British Pacific territories. (In Hong Kong and Indochina the Japanese imposed the yen. Why its policy should have differed in these two colonies is unclear: the Japanese occupations in Asia abound in anomalies.)
In Singapore the locals called it ‘banana money’ because the notes featured banana trees. Indeed, all the occupation currencies bore motifs characteristic of the territory in which they circulated, such as pagodas in Burma. The invasion money produced by the Japanese for New Guinea and the British Pacific territories bears the image of coconut palms: there is no mention of Australia or any Australian imagery on any of the notes that have ever been shown or depicted.
The money was more than a propaganda symbol. It sought to integrate local economies into a Japanese-controlled monetary system. The Japanese occupation regimes, however, were unable to exercise effective control. They responded to shortages of banknotes simply by printing as many as were needed (they were without serial numbers, and were therefore easily counterfeited). This led to severe inflation and to economic ruin for many individuals and families when in August 1945 all the banana money across Japan’s empire became worthless.
Stories about ‘invasion money’ abound, in print, in family memory and on the Internet. For example, the Brisbane Courier-Mail website The Peace Generation features the story of Chris Wilson, a survivor of the Burma–Thailand Railway. Wilson’s story is the familiar but unfailingly moving one of youthful enthusiasm leading to enlistment, capture in Singapore, the horrors of the railway and the disorientation of liberation. But the story also includes a photograph of banknotes bearing the inscription ‘The Japanese Government’, captioned, ‘Chris Wilson kept money printed by the Japanese for use in Australia after invasion.’ But these banknotes bear denomination in dollars – they are Straits dollars, produced for use in Malaya. There is not a pound note among them.36 (Interestingly, an international banknote collectors’ site warns, ‘Malaya [dollar] notes have been touted as “invasion” money made for the conquering of the U.S.’ This, it adds, ‘is not correct.’37 It would seem that invasion fantasies inspired by looking at banknotes simplistically are not confined to Australia.)
Australian servicemen found bundles of these notes when they liberated every Japanese administrative centre, from Lae to Jesselton (Kota Kinabalu) and Singapore to Rabaul. It had no value for the liberated locals, but represented a cheap, portable and evocative souvenir. Thousands of returning servicemen brought wads of notes home. They called it ‘invasion money’ and British Oceania currency became attached to the invasion that many had feared and expected but which almost none now understood had never been planned.
But let’s have a look at some of these banknotes from British Oceania. They all bear the inscription ‘The Japanese Government’ – not ‘The Japanese Government of Australia’, as people will often tell you, even when they are looking at an actual note that bears no such words. There is nothing on the face of these banknotes to make any connection with Australia: people read into them what they want to believe.
How do we know this? There are few more diligent recorders than numismatists. If there had been actual ‘Japanese Government of Australia’ banknotes, you can bet that banknote collectors would have tracked them down, then photographed, catalogued and valued them. There are none. The standard guides, Australian Coins, Notes & Medals and World War II Military Currency, make clear that occupation currency was issued by the Japanese Government for use in New Guinea, not Australia. They point out that the denomination – ‘half-shilling’ – had been characteristic of New Guinea currency since the German colonial period. ‘If the notes were intended for use in Australia, as is generally supposed,’ they ask, ‘why did the Japanese use a term that would be regarded as normal only in New Guinea …?’ Sadly, for collectors, these notes are ‘still too plentiful to have gained much numismatic status’.38
‘The world’s worst campaign planner’: Churchill and invasion
The potential Japanese threat to Australia was real, but it formed only part of a global war, a conflict whose chief British leader was already on the nose in Australia after Greece and Tobruk. Churchill’s role in Australia’s invasion crisis deserves special scrutiny.
Throughout the summer of 1941–42 British and American headquarters sent their Australian counterparts their own ‘appreciations’ of the Japanese threat. Allied estimates of Japanese capabilities were always less alarmist than Australian forecasts, and, in the event, more accurate. In late January 1942, Churchill reassured Curtin’s War Cabinet that the Japanese were unlikely to ‘undertake a serious mass invasion of Australia’.39 The fall of Singapore led newspaper editors to question this forecast by ‘authoritative quarters in London’ and doubt the basis for Churchill’s reassurance. Under the headline ‘Prospect of Invasion’, the Sydney Morning Herald noted tartly that since these ‘quarters’ had so often been wrong before, ‘this may be an added reason why Australia should prepare against an invasion’.40 After 1942 relations between Britain and Australia would change forever.
British analysts persisted. In March the British chiefs of staff saw no serious threat to Australia and by early April they wrote that they were sure a ‘genuine invasion of Australia does not form part of the present Japanese plans’, and gave their reasons. They reminded their Australian counterparts that Japan was involved in campaigns in China and Burma and was wary of war with Russia. Like the Japanese chiefs, they thought that Japan’s occupation of Fiji would be more useful than an invasion of Australia as a way of damaging Australia’s value to the Allies.41 The Australian chiefs seem to have been convinced, though they remained cautious.
Brian McKinley, who read almost all the capital-city dailies for his 1942: End of Innocence, identified a ‘groundswell of public anger’ against Churchill in the weeks after the fall of Singapore.42 The Bulletin, speaking in the nationalist strain it had made its own, condemned Churchill as the ‘world’s worst campaign planner’. Mary Gilmore’s diary includes cutting references to Britain’s failures. ‘Everyone thinks England’ (as almost everyone called Britain) ‘will let Singapore go as she let Hong Kong and Penang go … What fools have led the Empire.’ But the scepticism of Britain’s power and – even worse – its good faith was more widespread than among nationalist authors. In February 1942 Mary Gilmore told her taxi-driver that the sack of potatoes she asked him to carry into her Kings Cross apartment had been given to her by a cousin of Churchill. The man ‘swore a great oath’ and replied, ‘it was not —— potatoes that Australia wanted from Churchill but —— planes’.43
In fact, in March 1942 he had promised to send a couple of British divisions and later that month an armoured division, and squadrons of Spitfires that arrived only to see the air threat against Darwin dwindle. But the troops would come only if ‘Australia is being heavily invaded’ – that is ‘by, say eight or ten Japanese divisions’. (Curiously, this was exactly the scale of the invasion force proposed by enthusiastic staff officers in Tokyo.) However, as Churchill reiterated, ‘no signs have appeared of a heavy mass invasion of Australia.’44 What occurred – ‘localised attacks in the north,’ as he correctly put it – could easily be met by the 400 000 Australian and American troops already in Australia.
Churchill has been execrated in nationalist folklore for refusing to help Australia in its time of crisis. The parochialism of Australian indignation can be seen in many reactions to the war as it was reported. One of the most telling, perhaps, is Mary Gilmore’s response to a broadcast by the British deputy prime minister, Clement Atlee, on Anzac Day 1943. Dame Mary confided to her diary her outrage that Attlee repeated Churchill’s assurance that Britain would give ‘full aid to Australia and New Zealand in the event of Japanese invasion in force’. Gilmore, in the words of her biographer, Bill Wilde, was ‘both furious and sceptical’. ‘Why “after” invasion?’ she demanded. ‘Why not before …? And why only after an “invasion in force”?’45 Curtin had conceded the end of the invasion threat to his Cabinet colleagues, but would not admit it publicly for another few months. Mary Gilmore’s ire was a product of that reluctance to tell the public more of the truth sooner.
Through 1942 Churchill and Roosevelt attempted to reassure an apprehensive Curtin. In September Roosevelt told him that he ‘fully appreciate[d] the anxiety which you must naturally feel with regard to the security of Australia’. But he said that he agreed with the Combined Chiefs of Staff – that is, the most senior British and the American commanders – that the forces in Australia were enough both to defeat the Japanese in New Guinea and ‘provide for the security of Australia against an invasion on the scale that the Japanese were capable of launching’.46 Roosevelt and Churchill had to exercise tact in dealing with a leader whom they clearly thought lacked a realistic view. As Stanley Bruce warned Curtin in June 1942, he detected a growing feeling in London that ‘Australia is entirely selfish … irrespective of the common interest and the wide strategical necessities of the war’.47
The observation by John Moloney in his The Story of 200 Years is surely profoundly true: ‘Churchill’s opinion that Australia was temporarily expendable was not shared by the Australian government nor would it have been by the people had they been aware of it.’48 Fortunately, perhaps, wartime strategy (especially against ruthless and successful foes) is not best conducted by plebiscite. While Moloney is surely right – Australians lost faith with the empire in 1942 and it represents one of the decisive moments in shifting Australian opinion towards a national idea – Churchill’s strategic judgement was in fact vindicated.
Curtin’s Australian focus also explains why the Department of Information took up the phrase ‘Battle for Australia’: although not why it seems to have waited until the apparent threat had passed – in 1943 – before doing so. In 1944 the department published Jungle Victory, a photographic booklet showing some of the most graphic images taken by official photographers in the South-West Pacific Area. ‘This book,’ its anonymous author wrote, ‘is a pictorial record of what may be described as the Battle for Australia. No campaign,’ it continued, ‘has been more important to the people of Australia than the various battles in New Guinea which determined whether or not the Japanese would invade our mainland.’ Sixty-five years on, that remains a tenacious view.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Australians believed then and continue to believe that invasion was imminent. Japanese propaganda, too, continued to warn into 1943 that ‘Australia is menaced by an imminent invasion from Nippon’.49 That this was broadcast on April Fool’s Day may have escaped the notice of authorities in both Japan and Australia, but by then it was truly an empty threat. Invasion it seemed, had been deterred, but by Australia’s American allies.
Australia, showing actual Japanese attacks, 1942–43