CHAPTER 5

Japan ascendant
The unstoppable force

THE PROPHET OF JAPAN–AUSTRALIA: RUSSO

Peter Russo, an Australian, spent the years 1931–41 in Japan, first as a student and later as an academic and consultant. He was a delegate and later Australian advisor to Japan’s main organisation for international cultural relations, and advisor to the leader of the Japanese goodwill mission to Australia and New Zealand in 1935. Through his writing for the Melbourne Argus and his pro-Japanese ABC broadcasts, questions over Russo’s loyalty arose in the late 1930s when he was seen as a voice for Japanese expansion in the Pacific. He was certainly not apologetic about it. He chastised his fellow Australians, writing off all their concerns to racism and susceptibility to propaganda.

Russo had been born in Ballarat in 1908 to an Italian father and Italian–Spanish mother, and it was a Melbourne University scholarship that first sent him to Japan in 1931. He moved into a students’ hostel in Tokyo, ate only Japanese food, adopted Japanese clothing and attended Shinto ceremonies. This did not endear him to Tokyo’s narrow-minded European community, who were there chiefly for trade opportunities. He commenced his studies at the Imperial University of Tokyo, but interrupted them in 1932 to take up an appointment as advisor to the Japanese trade mission to Europe.

During the eighteen months that the mission was travelling, Russo attended language and literature courses at universities in Rome and Paris. He returned to Japan in 1933, was offered a lectureship in modern languages at the Tokyo College of Commerce and took up the position in April 1934.

In early 1935, Russo was asked to be one of two delegates to give a series of lectures and exhibit a selection of Japanese art and crafts in the West. Russo was to lecture in Australia. The tour was arranged by the cultural organisation KBS, whose president was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Prime Minister of Japan in 1937 and for some months in 1940. Konoe made sincere attempts to curb the military leadership. He had been at the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations in 1919 (we do not know if he discussed Billy Hughes’ behaviour in Paris, his vocal and successful opposition to including a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles, but it would have been very likely he did).

Russo was now writing his doctoral thesis and lecturing, but he was also asked to accompany Japanese diplomat Katsuji Debuchi, former Japanese Foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, as personal advisor on a goodwill tour of Australia and New Zealand. Japan was beginning to think of Australia as a friendly commercial neighbour due to the charming frankness and informality of Chief Justice of the High Court Sir John Latham’s visit to Japan the year before. Russo agreed to go, though he doubted how much good the delegation could do.

From the time of his arrival in Australia on the Atsuta Maru on 11 July 1936, Russo assured Australian journalists that it was appropriate for all thinking Australians to study Japanese history and civilisation. His lecture at the University of Melbourne on 9 August, before a large crowd, was entitled ‘The Mind of Japan’. His argument was that due to a lack of understanding of Japanese culture, the West misunderstood Japanese ambition and saw all that Japan did as threatening. Russo’s speeches, like his broadcasts, reproached Australians for not understanding this. Then Russo escorted Debuchi throughout his goodwill tour, beginning in Canberra. ‘We have been charmed with Mr Debuchi’s delightful and attractive personality,’ Prime Minister Lyons wrote to Japan’s Foreign minister.

Shortly after his return to Japan, Russo was offered regular duty with Konoe’s KBS. He arranged cultural exchanges and persuaded the Victorian Education Department to introduce a high-school Japanese-language program. He organised for the Melbourne University debating team to visit Japan. Russo’s friend Alexander Melbourne, an historian from the University of Queensland, asked the KBS to select a Japanese lecturer for the university. The post was subsequently filled by a scholar named Ryunosuke Seita.

In late 1937, Russo began to write regularly for the Melbourne Herald on Japanese matters, as well as sending a monthly Far Eastern newsletter to the ABC that was broadcast on radio and reproduced in ABC Weekly. He was concerned that the cultural relationship between the two countries was dwindling. By 1940 Russo admitted it was ‘one-way traffic’, with the Australians neglecting or snubbing Japan. The Japanese were sending cultural material to Australia but Australia did not respond. He himself donated books on Australia, paid for out of his own pocket, to Tokyo University.

It is not hard to see, even apart from Japanese expansion into China, why Russo’s hopes were withering. In May 1936, the Australians announced a policy of buying British rather than cheaper Japanese textiles. In November 1936, Japan and Germany concluded an anti-Comintern (Communist International) pact that Italy also later joined. In 1937, the Japanese began a further campaign against China, and it became clear that the militarists were in control in Japan. In May 1938, the popular travel writer Frank Clune reported, rightly or wrongly, that maps of the Japanese empire he had seen on sale in Japan included the whole of Australia and New Zealand. In the same year, a Japanese artist who visited Australia was astonished at the prevalence of anti-Japanese sentiment. In the imitation battles of Australian children, he noticed, the envisioned enemy was Japan. The artist is not named but his sentiments were published in the Sydney Morning Herald of 18 July 1938. After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, fear that Japan would join her pact partners, Germany and Italy, in the intensified Axis Pact was confirmed when Japan did exactly that in September 1940.

At the end of May 1940, Russo was awarded the Order of the Knight of the Crown of Italy for the promotion of Italian cultural relationships with Japan and Australia. He was embarrassed by the timing of the decoration, since Italy was soon to become an enemy power. The award had been prompted, he told his family, by the fact that he was a lecturer in Italian at Tokyo University and was responsible for the supervision of local Italian publications. He had been, he said, a ‘general rouse-about’ for Italian economic missions that had visited Japan in recent years.

By mid-1940, Russo’s second home leave came up. The KBS asked him to do all he could to smooth perceptions while in Australia. He would be bringing gifts and messages from Japanese leaders. The ABC had agreed to broadcast some of these messages, including one from his friend Prince Konoe, then Japanese Prime Minister: ‘Washed by the waters of the Pacific, neighbours in this fear of the future, are Australia and Japan, two vital dynamic countries whose cultural cooperation can do much to foster the causes of universal enlightenment through the mediums of art and science.’

Russo declared he himself wanted to take back with him to Japan ‘some tangible expression of Japan–Australia ties as distinct from the political vagaries that so often afflict international relationships’. By now his defence of Japanese policies had grown passionate. It was difficult to interpret Japan’s economic or political plans at present, he admitted, because, given the hostility of others, she was forced to follow a policy of expedience. The Japanese leadership sincerely desired cordial relationships with Australia but they felt that Australia might have cooperated more fully by appointing a representative in Japan. A mere trade commissioner to Japan was not enough, Russo pointed out. Again he accused Australians of lack of interest in Asian peoples and cultures. ‘It seems as if any man who wants to go to the East to study is regarded as a bit of a freak,’ he argued, with some merit. There was no attempt in the academies to acquaint students with Japan’s history and culture, he chided, and the result was a primitive understanding of world politics. European countries and their policies were not seen as strange and mysterious but Japan’s always were. Outsiders could not understand that the Emperor was placed as the ‘supreme personage to whose policies absolute unquestionable obedience was given no matter how illogical those policies might appear to others’.

On 18 August 1940, Prime Minister Menzies announced the appointment of Sir John Latham, while still chief justice, as the first Australian Minister to Japan. Russo had undoubtedly helped bring this about. Russo’s expertise led to his being asked by the acting Australian trade commissioner in Tokyo, Albert Hard, if he would supply the captions and dub in a newsreel message by Latham to the Japanese people. This was arranged through the Department of Information.

Russo’s activities in Australia were constantly monitored and, where the authorities considered necessary, censored. A military intelligence report of 5 August concluded that he was in Australia as a mouthpiece of the Japanese Foreign Office and that his mission was to suggest in the course of his speeches and broadcasts that Australia’s policy in the Far East should differ from that of Great Britain, and to suggest that in resisting trade pressure from Britain the Australian government would help to maintain trade and peace with Japan. Russo had also suggested that Australia had no interest in the Sino–Japanese conflict and that they should make this clear to Japan. He similarly argued that Australia had no interest in any argument between Britain and Japan over Hong Kong and Shanghai. He tried loosening the ties between Australia and Britain by emphasising Australia’s independent interests in the Pacific region. Russo, said military intelligence, was ‘under the cloak of patriotism for Australia’ spreading views that were an attempt to sever Australia from the British Empire’s policy in the Pacific . Russo was not on favourable terms with the British in Tokyo, because he had antipathy to their old-school-tie attitudes. But he was hurt by Australian intelligence’s inquiries about him in Tokyo, to which Japanese friends alerted him.

His sincerity made an impression on two criminal investigation branch officers who, after conversing with Russo for several hours, produced a different assessment. He seemed to these men to be loyal to Australia, and potentially useful. But his ideas were under attack in the media, and to many correspondents to newspapers the idea of fraternising with a government (and a race) responsible for the occupation of Korea and Manchuria and now the attempted seizure of China was ‘just plainly repulsive’. The rape of Nanking had also produced abhorrence in Australians. Russo and the honorary consul for Japan in Melbourne, David York Syme, a Melbourne businessman with interests in trade with Japan, received threatening letters, one of which gave Russo twenty-four hours to live. A letter writer from Ballarat to the prime minister related rumours that Russo was a Japanese–Italian agent and that one of his sisters was openly a Nazi sympathiser.

Russo was caught between stools. He knew that if he returned to Japan his life would be more constricted and more dangerous. Though his university appointment gave him some protection, his writing for Australian newspapers and radio placed him at risk. His Tokyo rooms had been searched by Japan’s military police. On 2 October, still in Australia, he wrote to Akiyama, Japanese consul in Sydney, seeking advice on whether to extend his stay in Australia or to return to Japan. Akiyama advised him to return to Japan ‘for the purpose of acquainting yourself with the latest trends of thought there and ascertaining the actual conditions at first hand’; Russo would have more authority by speaking from Japan about conditions. So he went back. Years later he stated that the casualness and hopeful attitudes of many foreigners in Tokyo before the war broke out in the Pacific was wishful thinking, based on their comfortable life in Japan. He acknowledged that they would have a problem ‘to re-groove ourselves back home’.

In one unusually revealing article published in a Sydney newspaper shortly before he returned to Japan, Russo explained why he was returning when other foreigners were leaving. Perhaps he was going back because of fear itself, he said, but he hoped it wasn’t that. Since he had been for so long identified in Japan with Australia and Australian education it would be ‘a deplorable anti-climax and a loss of face if he were to run out on his job when trouble loomed’. He then laid the blame for Japan’s aggression in China squarely at the feet of the Europeans for cramping Japanese aspirations for territory and resources: ‘The history of the Japanese shows that they are essentially a peace-loving people. If then, we go to war with Japan, we shall be facing, like Frankenstein’s creator, what we have helped to establish.’

In December 1940, Russo found Japan markedly changed, with shortages of food, petrol, medicine and accommodation. But the most remarkable changes were in public attitudes. He reported in his Far Eastern newsletter for the ABC that the Japanese ‘point at Japan’s critical state, and blame it on their Western-style politicians who have neglected the Imperial Way and tried only to ape the ungodly methods of the West’. Russo said with literary grace that the atmosphere was ‘charged with that clammy lull that comes before earthquakes and typhoons’, and foreigners kept leaving. By March 1941 he was the only Australian left in Tokyo. He was already making arrangements for his own departure, however.

For months his university colleagues had urged him to leave, and a friend and mentor, Professor Yeda, even threatened to recommend Russo be dismissed from his post as a way of saving him. But he resisted the advice until he received a telegram from Sir Keith Murdoch, offering him a position as a commentator with the Melbourne Herald. The offer enabled Russo to leave without losing face, a consideration that had become as important to him as it would have been for a Japanese. The KBS chairman accepted Russo’s letter of resignation with regret but acknowledged that his services were urgently needed in Australia.

When Russo boarded his ship at Yokohama he was ‘still half convinced that I was tossing in my hand prematurely’. He arrived in Sydney on the Tokyo Maru on 16 April 1941 and immediately adopted a defensive stance. Japan had reached a stage of desperation at which any miscalculation or incident could set the ball rolling, he said. For some months into the Pacific War he was still attempting to explain rather than condemn Japan’s actions. He was not interned, and his expertise in Asian affairs was sought both during the war and afterwards, especially when Cold War hostilities demanded the style of analysis that rose above popular hysteria.

JUMPY ABOUT INVASION

On 1 December 1941 in Canberra, the House adjourned for what was expected to be a period of three and a half months, but Curtin’s War Cabinet, the ministers whose portfolios directly related to defence and, as the phrase went, ‘putting Australia on a war footing’, were to hold an emergency meeting in Melbourne on 3 December with the Chiefs of Staff. Curtin intended to return to Canberra for Elsie’s sake, given that she felt lost in the Lodge. Because of the pace at which the scene in the Pacific was developing, however, he stayed the weekend in Melbourne. Japanese convoys had by now been sighted leaving Indochina, present-day Vietnam, for destinations that could merely be guessed at.

In those days prime ministers led lives that were much closer to those of the people who elected them. The Bruce family, whom Curtin had met years before in the Victorian Socialist Party, were friends he enjoyed visiting in Melbourne, and he had great affection for the Bruce daughters, Yatala, Jennie and Beryl. Over that last weekend of peace in the Pacific he decided to visit the Bruce women at Beryl’s house in Simpson Street, East Melbourne. Yatala’s son, John Bruce Ovenden, who was sixteen, saw the prime minister turn up, ‘restless and terribly disturbed’. Normally Curtin walked to the Bruces’, or caught a tram from the Victoria Palace Hotel. But this time he was driven in his official car, a black Buick, because he did not know how soon he would be summoned back. He kept sending his driver off to the Federal Members’ Rooms in the city to see what was happening. The Bruce kids and their friends enjoyed rare rides across Melbourne in the prime ministerial limousine on Australia’s last day of security, as the driver picked up on the latest intelligence and brought it back to Curtin. At last Curtin told the Bruce sisters, ‘I’ve got to go back. Big things are happening. I’ll know within an hour or so.’

On Monday, 8 December, Don Rodgers, Curtin’s intimate and pressman, woke him up with the news that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been picked up by the Australian government’s shortwave radio monitoring service. ‘Well, it has come,’ sighed Curtin. It was a characteristic statement, seeming to fall light as a leaf. His powers of resignation, however, were not as great as the vulnerability of his spirit.

The same day, but on the Australian side of the dateline, General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s 25th Army began landing in Malaya. A War Cabinet meeting was held that morning. The farcical state of Australian defences seemed all the more obvious now: there were only sufficient machine guns and anti-tank guns to equip half the militia. Vickers machine guns were being manufactured in Australia at a rate of two hundred per month, but most were exported to other fronts under contract with the British and only twenty of these kept for Australian purposes. There were a few tanks available for training purposes. The fighters and heavy bombers were few in number and obsolescent. Despite the hysteria about Japan that reigned in Australia from the mid-1890s, Australia found itself on the morning of 8 December 1941 utterly naked to an aggression that it believed, with a perhaps egocentric but understandable certainty, was aimed at the South-West as well as the Northern Pacific.

The Friday before, Hilary Hughes, a young infantryman at Wallgrove Camp in western Sydney, said that he and other soldiers became rebellious when their weekend leave passes were cancelled. They did not know it would be the last weekend of peace in the Pacific. Hughes’ brigade went on strike, and on the afternoon of 6 December marched to Parramatta Station, commandeered trains and took them to wherever home was. They were all back on Sunday afternoon and were charged with two days’ AWL (absent without leave). By Monday morning, when the news of Pearl Harbor came through, they knew why their leave had been countermanded.

In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Malaya, Curtin said that he did not intend to bring back the three AIF divisions from the Middle East yet, but he wondered aloud whether air-force trainees should continue to be sent to Britain. Above all, what was not known that morning of 8 December was that there existed an agreement between the United States and Britain that Anglo–American forces would concentrate on defeating Germany first. It was Shedden the public servant, even though he was as strong an Empire man as any, who suggested to Curtin that Britain could not be depended on in the Pacific and Indian oceans. He had not believed the promises Churchill had made to Menzies, and he urged Curtin to declare the war against Japan to be a ‘new war’ rather than a mere increment in hostilities. The government issued its own formal declaration of war against Japan, but not as an automatic reaction to British intentions, as had been the case with Menzies at the beginning of war in Europe.

That night Curtin broadcast to the nation from the ABC studios in Sydney. The country itself was now ‘the stake in this conflict’, he said. This was Australia’s ‘darkest hour’. The Australians must ‘hold this country, and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race and as a place where civilisation will persist’. The ordinary Australian listened to him with tolerance and trust, though some conservatives still considered him a dangerous socialist.

Curtin’s wife Elsie was going back to Western Australia by train to spend Christmas with her mother, and when ambushed by a journalist while changing trains in Adelaide, she said percipiently and shyly that the Japanese sinking of the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya on 10 December had vindicated her husband’s belief in ‘bombers before battleships’.

The two battleships had been sent to honour Churchill’s promise to fortify Singapore. On the afternoon of 8 December 1941, they sailed with four destroyers, including HMAS Vampire, from Singapore to take on the Japanese invasion fleet off Kota Bharu on the Malayan east coast. With no air cover to protect them, they were attacked shortly after 11 a.m. on 10 December by two Japanese air flotillas. Both of the British ships were sunk by torpedo planes in mercilessly swift order, with the loss of over eight hundred men, and there were no longer any British capital ships in the region capable of taking on the Japanese. The next day, Curtin declared, ‘For years I have insisted that a maximum air defence was imperative to the efficiency of land and sea forces—however strong they might be. Now we are faced with the reality.’ He did not, however, cancel the transfer of air personnel through the Empire training scheme in Canada to British airfields. He was still a son of the Empire. But the War Cabinet approved a call-up of 114,000 men for the army and the sending of Australian troops to Darwin, Port Moresby and Timor.

Parliament was called back into session on 16 December. In the meantime, General Iven Mackay, ‘Mr Chips’, now Commander of the Home Forces, urged rather grimly that the public be warned that the Japanese were likely to enjoy early success in invading Australia, and that the population were to all stay level-headed, for they might well come out on top in the end. Curtin also heard from the urbane Vivian Bowden in Singapore, Australia’s representative on the War Council, that it was a matter of weeks before Singapore would fall. Bowden had been a good advisor from the start, a polished fellow who had worked many years in Shanghai and represented Australia’s trade interests there. He was a novelist, too, who had found time to publish two books, in 1929 and 1930. Bowden had moved to Singapore at the Australian government’s request when Australia closed its trade office in Shanghai in 1940. To read his cables and reports is to be convinced he was the clearest-headed official in Singapore. His voice shines with clarity amongst all the prevarications of generals and statesmen.

As the Japanese advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, facing only a rare and minor loss and delay, Curtin feared that the troops in Singapore would be victims of the same sort of fiasco as those in Greece and Crete. In the midst of these fears, the Melbourne Herald asked Curtin to provide a New Year message for the Australian people, and it was published on 27 December.

Curtin began by quoting Bernard O’Dowd:

That reddish veil which o’er the face
Of night-hag East is drawn . . .
Flames new disaster for the race?
Or can it be the dawn?

‘I see 1942 as the year in which we shall know the answer,’ he said, and the Australians would need to provide it. Australia was now ‘within the fighting lines’. But amongst other things, Curtin hoped that Russia might take on Japan from the direction of Siberia, and attack her flank so that her southward drive might be distracted and thwarted. After all, said Curtin, innocent of knowledge of what Roosevelt and Churchill had already decided, no one front was any more important than another.

Churchill abominated Curtin’s suggestion about Russia taking on the Japanese. He wanted the entirety of the Russian army concentrated upon the Germans. But the sentence Churchill found particularly ‘insulting’ in Curtin’s broadcast was the sentiment: ‘Without any inhibition of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

Churchill sent a message of chastisement, which declared that Britain and the United States would have a primary role in deciding Pacific strategy—not, as Curtin had said, Australia and the United States. A number of Australian conservatives shared Churchill’s fury. They had eaten their Christmas dinners still absolutely convinced that in Malaya—or at least Singapore—the ‘racially inferior’ Japanese would be defeated, and that Singapore would remain an unassailable rock. Even Curtin himself might have felt a little sheepish after the broadcast, to the extent that Don Rodgers, his press secretary, volunteered that he rather than Curtin had drafted the message, and that Curtin had made very little change to the draft apart from adding the Bernard O’Dowd lines.

The explosive feelings on both sides, Japan and Australia, had a long time fuse. There had been a balance arranged between Australia and Japan in the 1920 Peace Treaty: the Japanese should have mandates over islands in the North Pacific, while Australia held mandates over islands in the South Pacific. Hughes had used the Australian dead as a claim on Britain to try to persuade it to distance itself from its then friend and World War I ally Japan. Australian intelligence analyst Edmund Piesse had complained about this tactic after the Paris conference: ‘I withdraw all my optimism about our future relations with Japan . . . we have been perhaps the chief factor in consolidating the whole Japanese nation behind the Imperialists.’ British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald would call the White Australia Policy ‘a menace to civilisation’.

Curtin also declared that Australia went to war with Japan ‘because our vital interests are imperilled and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed’. But many people in the Pacific were not, in fact, free. There was Dutch repression in Indonesia and British overlordship in Malaya. In Indochina, rebellion brought severe repression from the French rulers, particularly in 1930 when the people tried to create Xo-viets (Soviets), committees of peasants and workers. The French hit back with air and ground attacks that caused ten thousand casualties.

Australia’s own record in Papua and New Guinea before the war did not bespeak equality. The Native Regulations and Ordinances for Papua, according to former district commissioner David Marsh, decreed that ‘a native wasn’t allowed to drink’. He couldn’t go into a picture show with Europeans. When walking along a footpath the native was expected to move aside for whites. ‘We had a White Women’s Protection Ordinance which more or less said that if you smiled at a white woman it was rape . . . they also had a Native Women’s Protection Ordinance which . . . didn’t mean much anyway.’

Curtin certainly described himself and his fellow countrymen as trying to secure ‘the future of the white man in the Pacific’ (emphasis added). He invoked White Australia as part of Australia’s war aims. The drink-sodden General Blamey helped by calling the Japanese soldier ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’. General Clowes, ultimately the commander at the historic battle of Milne Bay, said that defeating the enemy was ‘a most effective way of demonstrating the superiority of the white race’.

FIFTH COLUMN

William Cooper, secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, declared on the verge of war that ‘the Aborigine has no status, no rights, no land . . . he has no country and nothing to fight for but the privilege of defending the land which was taken from him by a white race without compensation or even kindness’. But in fact Aboriginal troops were not particularly welcomed into the armed forces.

In 1939, some in the establishment had been terrified that the Aborigines might become a fifth column, with sinister Lutheran missionaries turning them into a pro-German force. Army intelligence took control of the Beagle Bay mission in Western Australia and, in turn, of missionaries of German descent. The member for the Northern Territory accused Patrol Officer Strehlow, son of a pastor and known for his pro-Aboriginal sentiments, of being a Nazi and the sort of man who could influence Aborigines in the Third Reich’s favour. In 1941, Western Australia amended its Native Administration Act to stop Aborigines moving south of the 20th parallel while at Katanning, one of many places where blacks had found themselves earning more money due to wartime construction projects. The local government confined them to shopping on one day of the week to prevent them being exposed to left-wing ideas.

In 1940, the Melbourne Sun noted the protest of Pastor Doug Nicholls: ‘Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?’ But similar hysterias to those of which Nicholls complained would emerge with the advance of the new enemy. In August 1942, the manager of a station at Lake Tyers, Victoria, where black soldiers had enlisted but had then been discharged out of the army, mentioned ‘the generally expressed opinion of the youth of the Station . . . that they would get a “better spin” under Japanese rule’. The 4th Independent Company operating in the Northern Territory reported that ‘several natives on questioning favour the Japanese . . . they further state that the white men have not given them anything and on a number of occasions have molested them and their lubras [women]’. These sentiments were based not on a firm idea about what the Japanese state philosophy was towards such people as them, but on a longing for some other regime than the one they were under. One pastoralist warned anxiously that blacks were frequenting the part of Cairns called Malay Town, the headquarters of Japanese fishing crews. But that was not remarkable, since they were forbidden to enter other parts of town.

Patrol Officer Bob Darkin recalled that in the Cairns area ‘what we had to do was raid their camps piccaninny daylight, just before dawn’, for the purposes of moving disaffected Aborigines further inland where they could not act as a fifth column for the Japanese enemy. In Western Australia, a special force rounded up all unemployed Aborigines from the hinterland and interned them in the Moore River camp as ‘possible potential enemies’. All Australian Aborigines over the age of fourteen were issued with a military permit listing where they lived, worked and travelled. The permits were written in either red or black ink; red meant that the holder was subversive.

Sapper Bert Beros would become famous for his poem about the ‘fuzzy-wuzzy angels’, the villagers who assisted Australian soldiers in New Guinea, but his verses about ‘The Coloured Digger’ remind us:

He’d heard us talk democracy—
They preach it to his face—
Yet knows that in our Federal House
There’s no one of his race.

The first small squad of Americans to arrive in Australia was led by General George Brett of the US Army Air Forces, who flew into Brisbane with his staff on 28 December 1941, the day after Curtin’s appeal to the United States in his New Year message. They had not come in response to Curtin’s oratory, but rather to prepare Australia as a base for American forces, given that the surrender of the Philippines, like that of Singapore, was already thought by Washington to be inevitable. But even in the hour of peril the White Australia Policy overrode other considerations—the Advisory War Council on 12 January voted that no black American troops should be accepted into Australia. Curtin vetoed the decision, but only after the assurance that the African Americans who were shipped to Australia would be used for construction in Far North Queensland.

Curtin, still receiving his regular and reliable messages from Bowden in Singapore, wrote to wife Elsie on 5 January: ‘The war goes very badly and I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily.’ Churchill’s concerns were for North Africa and India and ‘they can’t be for Australia and New Zealand. The truth is that Britain never thought Japan would fight and made no preparations to meet the eventuality . . . Notwithstanding two years of Menzies we have to really start production. But enough, I love you, and that is all there is to say.’

Evatt expressed outrage to Curtin when the Sydney Morning Herald announced on 14 January 1942 that the US Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, had told an American audience that ‘the battle of the Atlantic was still the most important struggle of the war’. He had warned Americans against expecting ‘favourable’ and triumphant naval engagements in the Pacific in the near future. Evatt cabled Richard Casey, the sage and highly experienced Australian representative recently appointed by Menzies to Washington, and ordered him to object to the unsuitability of Knox’s statement, and also to declare that Australia’s lack of an equal voice in the discussions between Britain and the United States was unacceptable.

But America had been worked on by the master, Churchill. In early January, while he rested in Florida after meetings with the Roosevelts, Churchill complained that the Australians were ‘jumpy about invasion’, and that their lack of a sturdy attitude towards it all was due to their being from ‘bad stock’. Earle Page—Country Party politician, Grafton surgeon, former deputy prime minister and flayer of Prime Minister Menzies for his poor performance in wartime—was now Australian representative to the British War Cabinet and high commissioner in London and there attended a British War Cabinet Defence Committee meeting at which he heard Churchill declare that Singapore might be lost but that the defence of Burma was what was important, since if Burma fell, the vital connection between India and an embattled Chinese Nationalist Army, fighting the Japanese, would be broken. Page then mistakenly reported to Curtin that Churchill was planning to evacuate Singapore. But the reality, which Curtin grasped, was that Singapore would now be left to its fate, as was the besieged British and Canadian garrison in Hong Kong. Whether the evacuation rumour was valid or not, Curtin’s resultant cable to Churchill was robust in its assertions and demands: ‘After all the assurances we have been given, the evacuation of Singapore would be regarded here and elsewhere as an inexcusable betrayal.’ He had other hard words for Churchill about the intended diversion of any Australian troops to Burma. Any Australian reinforcements available should go to the Netherlands East Indies, the fifteen hundred islands that make up present-day Indonesia. And the lack of aircraft in Australia and the region was critical, said Curtin: ‘Our experiences at Ambon and Rabaul have emphasised the urgent necessity for fighter aircraft immediately . . . It is impossible to expect us to give effective resistance with the inadequate aircraft at our disposal and we desire the allotment of United States aircraft of suitable types.’

Further, said Curtin, ‘The trend of the situation in Malaya and the attack on Rabaul are giving rise to a public feeling of grave uneasiness at Allied impotence to stem the Japanese advance . . . The Australian people, having volunteered for service overseas in large numbers, find it difficult to understand why they must wait so long for an improvement in the situation.’

THE MALAY BARRIER

In early 1942, Australia had small garrisons stationed on a series of islands in an arc across the north of the continent. This deployment, in Rabaul (New Britain), Ambon (in present-day Indonesia) and Timor, was known by the grand name of the ‘Malay Barrier’. Those in Rabaul were Lark Force, those on Ambon Gull Force, and Sparrow Force had been committed to East Timor in December 1941. The Malay Barrier could not be anything like a barrier to the Japanese, and one wonders at the distractedness of the planners and politicians who, in desperation, left these three garrisons dangling in Japan’s path.

While attention was fixed on Malaya and Singapore, by the end of January 1942, New Britain and Ambon would fall to Japanese landings. As when the Australians had captured it in 1914, Rabaul was a strategic port, a prize of empires, situated on the Gazelle Peninsula on the crescent-shaped island of New Britain. Along with the garrison there, an RAAF squadron of four Hudson bombers and eight Wirraways was in place to defend Rabaul from the air, but as in Singapore, the planes were overwhelmingly outnumbered and known to be easy meat for the Japanese air force. Before taking off to face a numerous force of Japanese bombers and fighters on 21 January, Wing Commander J.M. Lerew signalled RAAF headquarters in Melbourne, his home town, ‘Those who are about to die salute you.’ Lerew would survive, but many of his pilots did not. The Japanese, in one raid on a small position, were able to deploy sixty aircraft.

On 23 January, a Japanese force supported by battleships and aircraft carriers landed near Rabaul. From their entrenchments at Vulcan Beach, the Australian 22nd Battalion and local civilian militia staged a strong resistance, but in a number of other places the Japanese landed unopposed. On nearby New Ireland, a small Australian force, an Independent Company, was almost instantly overrun. Colonel J.J. Scanlan, who as a civilian had been deputy governor of Hobart Gaol, had declared to his men at Rabaul, ‘There shall be no withdrawal.’ But as in Malaya and Greece, such orders would be swept away by reality, and no plan had been made for an inevitable withdrawal. An officer had suggested building up a food dump with two years’ supplies somewhere in the mountains behind the port, but the idea had not been pursued.

European and Australian women and children had already been evacuated to Australia, but again the White Australia Policy struck—the wives and children of the Chinese population, who were also the enemies of Japan, were not included in the evacuation, and now faced both the bombs from above and, more than anything, the chance of massacre of the kind that had occurred in many mainland Chinese cities. Once the Japanese occupation began, the men were reduced to coolie status, and many of the females became ‘comfort women’.

The order issued to the surviving Australian soldiers of the fight around Rabaul was to retreat as best they could. Small groups of soldiers began to head south through the jungle. A hundred and thirty Australian troops would be caught on the coast by a Japanese party coming ashore from landing craft near the plantation at Tol. Some soldiers surrendered, others attempted to escape and were also rounded up. At the Tol plantation house the two Australian officers who had negotiated the surrender were separated, and a piece of cloth written with Japanese script was placed on their belts. With others who had been in the surrender party, they were marched away. The rest were lined up in fours and their hands tied behind their backs. They were marched off into the undergrowth at the edge of the plantation. Private A.L. Robinson, of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, a Queenslander by birth, would later write, ‘I decided that this was a shooting party and that if one were to be shot one might as well be shot trying to escape as be “done in” in cold blood.’ Robinson launched himself out of the line and hid in the undergrowth. He heard one of the doomed men still in the line call to him, ‘Lower, Sport.’ After three days’ wandering in the bush, his hands still tied, he was found by a group of civilians, and eventually escaped by boat. Private W.D. Collins would also escape from a line of men who were being bayoneted to death. Private T.B. Clissold of the Field Ambulance, a farm labourer wearing a Red Cross armband, had it torn from his arm. When he asked if he could be shot instead of bayoneted, the presiding Japanese officer obliged him.

Trying to make time through the jungle, escapees became exhausted, and a number were felled by malaria and other fevers. They were lucky to find taro roots to eat. Exhaustion and hunger delayed and in some cases defeated them. The Japanese aircraft dropped leaflets that declared, ‘You can find neither food nor way of escape in this island and you will only die of hunger unless you surrender.’ On 9 February, a Japanese force landed at Gasmata in the south, blocking the escape route, but nonetheless, in various parties, four hundred troops escaped to board small craft.

A few days after the fall of Rabaul at the end of January, Gull Force on Ambon Island faced a Japanese landing. They tried to defend the Laha airstrip, but were overrun. Over nearly a fortnight, three hundred prisoners were taken in small groups into the jungle around the airfield and killed, an even worse atrocity than Tol. Three-quarters of the remaining Australian prisoners taken on Ambon would die in captivity.

On Timor, Sparrow Force divided itself between Dutch and Portuguese Timor. Japanese air attacks began on Australia Day 1942. But Sparrow Force was still holding out and awaiting the inevitable Japanese invasion.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

In Australia, workers, at least, were now in a heady and unfamiliar position of power, and they exercised it with stoppages on wharves and in the mines. Many unionists were conscripted into the militia, certainly more out of urgency than vengefulness. Curtin’s Caucus opponent, pugnacious Eddie Ward from the then working-class purlieus of Paddington and Darlinghurst in Sydney, wanted him to nationalise all essential industries.

But even while the Japanese were bombing the Australian garrison at Rabaul, and their troops were about to land there, Curtin was already exhausted. Given that he possessed a strange compound of toughness and almost neurotic sensibility, and that he was the sort of person who saw himself as bearing the prime culpability should things go wrong, and hearing that he was so haunted at night that he walked out of the Lodge to talk to drovers in nearby camps, his Cabinet insisted he take a break to go home and see Elsie in Cottesloe. Meanwhile, to describe the situation, Curtin quoted from Lord Byron’s ‘The Eve of Waterloo’: ‘nearer, clearer, deadlier than before.’ When he left Canberra on 21 January, the BBC reported, to his acute embarrassment, that he was on holiday. Indeed, he made speeches in Adelaide and in the west, and was back in Canberra later in the month to attend the marriage of one of Belle Southwell’s nieces in the Presbyterian church in Canberra, a ceremony conducted by the Reverend Hector Harrison, a near neighbour, on whom he sometimes called for comfort.

As Singapore looked ready to fall in early February, Menzies, on the opposition benches, wrote to Curtin advising him against reinforcing the Netherlands East Indies against the Japanese, since the Australians would merely be gobbled up. It was a reasonable alert. The 6th and 7th divisions were now on their way back from the Middle East, sixty-four thousand troops in all, and were originally slated to help the Dutch on Java and Sumatra. It quickly became clear that they would indeed be thrown away, as Menzies argued, if they were sent to the East Indies. The idea was that the troops would go now either to Burma or Australia, and General Sturdee, the chief of staff in Melbourne, was insistent that it should be Australia. It was a fortunate insistence, given that the British and Indian forces in Burma were soon to be devoured whole by the Japanese.

FIGHTING THE TIGER

Captain Adrian Curlewis, a lawyer and a member of Australian General Gordon Bennett’s staff in Singapore, on 5 December 1941 was reflecting on his imminent fortieth birthday, to be spent far from his wife and family. He expressed the worry that when he returned at the end of the war he would be asked what he had done during it, and would have to say apologetically, ‘I was in Malaya.’

But once the Japanese invasion began, Curlewis’s sense of ennui and futility vanished. He had been given charge of a convoy moving up across the causeway that connected Singapore to Malaya, leaving at 5.30 p.m. on 7 December—that is, in the last hours of peace. The camp they reached the next morning was full of rumours of landings. ‘Did I worry? My oath I did.’ He was aware that the code word ‘Raffles’, a signal for assuming the first degree of preparedness, had come through. Within a few days he heard gunfire at sea and realised later that what he had heard was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.

And it would be like Greece and Crete from then on: the enemy superior in the air, penetrating and outflanking so-called ‘fixed lines’—tactics assuming that the Japanese would oblige the Allies by attacking them frontally and across open ground. Some Scottish, Gurkha (Nepalese) and Indian troops were holding up the Japanese in the north-west of Malaya. But in the end the mobile Japanese units encircled the prepared positions, captured bridges over Slim River and caused the British to retreat down the peninsula. By 12 December, retreating in Johor Bahru, Curlewis described a short jungle break: ‘I stood around in the wettest of mud, I swallowed quinine, I ate what I could, I drank dozens of mugs of filthy tea . . . I went two days without a bath in sweaty clothing . . . Four hours off in thirty-six to lie in a dank, insect-infested tent.’ There was a stream of Chinese and Tamil evacuees.

In the perhaps unjust view of the truculent Australian commander of the 8th Division AIF, Major-General Henry Gordon Bennett, a citizen soldier, clothing manufacturer and public accountant, the British were incompetent and poorly led (the young Australian gunner Braddon would have agreed with him but included Bennett in the mix of incompetence as well). General Arthur Percival, the overall British commander on the ground, was certainly totally out-campaigned by the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, Tomoyuki Yamashita. And above Percival, the Commander in Chief Far East, and commander of the short-lived ABDACOM (American–British–Dutch–Australian Command), was General Archibald Wavell, who had been surprised by Rommel the previous northern spring in Africa.

Percival himself had complaints about Bennett. ‘Bennett campaigned more for the well-being of the AIF than for anything else,’ he claimed. It sounds a nonsensical quibble, given that even the opinionated Bennett knew that he and Percival, and the Australians, Indians and British in general, must survive or be obliterated together.

On 6 January 1942, Bennett reported to Curtin in Australia, ‘Unless great changes in outlook take place withdrawal will continue, exposing my left flank [on Malaya’s west coast] and ultimately creating impossible position for AIF.’ Wavell, visiting Singapore the next day, expressed the unrealistic hope that the Australian corps might be brought in from the Middle East to launch a counter-offensive. But Singapore would fall long before the troops in North Africa could be loaded on ships. In the meantime, Wavell was confident in Bennett and the Westforce, of which Bennett took command on 10 January. It consisted of the 9th Indian Division, the 8th Australian Division (minus a brigade), and various artillery and other units, including a battalion of the Norfolk regiment, the Norfolks. Their task was to stop the Japanese in Johore. In his prediction, Wavell expected air reinforcements—ambiguously promised by the War Cabinet in London, but which would never come.

Bowden, the Australian representative on the Far Eastern War Council in Singapore, was not confident as the Australians went forward. He cabled Evatt that Duff Cooper, the resident British Cabinet minister in Singapore, and a writer like his chief, Winston Churchill, was an able man but not a dominant one, and did not provide the council with strong leadership. Air Chief Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham, had shown, said Bowden, ‘an extraordinary diffidence of manner for a man in his position’, and in Bowden’s opinion was too old for the job. Bowden declared that Percival did not appear to be a strong personality; that Air Vice-Marshal Conway Pulford was ‘very worried and greatly overworked’, a situation understandable in view of his ineffectual and increasingly outnumbered aircraft; and that the governor of the Straits Settlements, Sir Shenton Thomas, appeared better at finding reasons for not doing things than for doing them.

Even in the hour of peril, White Australia yet again asserted itself. Sir Shenton Thomas asked Australia to serve as a refuge for Singaporeans displaced by the Japanese invasion. Thomas wanted Australia to accept five thousand Chinese and Eurasians. On 23 January, he declared himself shocked by the Australian government’s decision to admit only fifty Chinese and fifty Eurasians. Two representatives of the Chinese government had spoken bitterly to Thomas about it: ‘In this city of 600,000, of whom 85 per cent are Chinese, it is absolutely essential that we should have this assistance . . . temporary asylum for wives and children of those who wish to send them away.’

Against a background of less than administrative and military competence, Percival told Bennett that his forces, which were to be stretched westwards from Batu Anam, on the main north–south road through Johore, across to Muar, and the Muar River crossing, and then on to the west coast, must hold their line. ‘If this position is lost, the battle of Singapore is lost,’ said Percival. ‘It is naturally disturbing to learn that the Japanese have been able to overrun the whole of Malaya except Johore,’ Curtin cabled Churchill. ‘It is observed that the 8th Australian Division is to be given the task of fighting the decisive battle.’ He therefore urged Churchill to send reinforcements as soon as he could.

As Westforce, largely but not entirely Australians and Indians, went north into Johor, they did so against a tide of fleeing tuans, British plantation managers and bureaucrats, and trucks filled with British troops half-dead with exhaustion. ‘Lorries bearing the names of half the rubber estates in Malaya’ went past, said an Australian, and amongst them were also steamrollers, fire engines, tin-dredging machinery, private motor cars, including Rolls-Royces, and Red Cross ambulances.

It could be argued that Bennett’s disposition of his troops along the line to be held in Johor was little better than the tactics used by the British, but other commentators think his plan was a good one. He did seek to ensure that the defence should be fluid, with as many men as possible held back ready for counter-attacks and to deal with Japanese attempts to outflank them. Bennett planned to open hostilities by placing an ambush west of a village named Gemas on the main road south. He ordered that a wooden bridge over a small river at Gemas be wired for explosion. The ambushing soldiers, the 30th Battalion AIF under Frederick ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan, were put in place on the morning of 14 January, and the password ‘Switch’ was sent around, indicating that the retreating 3rd Indian Corps had passed safely through Bennett’s lines and that the next people they would see would be the enemy. Men waited in the jungle in high humidity through the ferocious heat of the midday hours, and at about four o’clock in the afternoon, six hours after the password was given, a long column of Japanese riding bicycles approached the bridge. They were men of the veteran Japanese 5th Division, the Carp Division, riding five or six abreast, relaxedly chatting, their rifles on their backs. Two to three hundred of the cyclists passed over the bridge and past the ambush, to be dealt with by the troops in the rear. Then the bridge was blown. Bicycles and men were hurled into the air, and the ambush began.

The Japanese military machine would soon enough take its vengeance for Gemas, and it is true that the Carp Division had been guilty of savagery in southern China and Saigon, but it is hard not to feel a certain pity for the infantry on their bicycles, those who survived the bridge detonation being now blown apart by grenades thrown down onto the road, and killed by weaponry. Lieutenant-Colonel G.D. Duffy, a thirty-year-old civilian soldier from Sydney, wrote, ‘The entire three hundred yards [275 metres] of road was quickly covered with dead and dying men.’ A thousand Japanese were killed in this operation.

After the ambush, it was time for the battalion to retire to the main line. One of the men, Lance Corporal I.G. Hann, a hotel barman from Moree in New South Wales who would die later in imprisonment, was captured by the Japanese, locked in a hut, released by a Malay and, dressed in a turban and other borrowed Indian clothing, made his way back to meet up with an Australian patrol from the main lines near the Muar River.

Towards the coast, on the left flank of Westforce, the 45th Indian Brigade and Australian artillery were under pressure at the Muar River ferry crossing. The Japanese air force had been bombing Muar since 11 January. Now the infantry attacked by way of fords across the river. The men in the Allied line were nervous, not knowing if there had also been a coastal landing behind their line by the Japanese. Bennett asked that Australian aircraft attack the Japanese lines in the Indian sector, and a number of Japanese tanks were destroyed by Australian anti-tank fire while approaching the bridge over the river. On 16 January, though Japanese landing craft at the river mouth were driven off, Japanese troops used a number of small boats confiscated from the Malays to cross the Muar River, and thus captured larger craft for ferrying troops to the Australian- and Indian-held side of the river. But so far Muar held.

The Japanese were not easily cowed, but the (temporary) failure of this attack, in a campaign where their march had had a feeling of inevitability, would certainly have given them pause. The battle at Gemas, and the arrival of a reinforcement column in Singapore, gave the Allies great if transitory comfort. The tide of battle was surely on the turn with, as was said on Singapore Radio, ‘The AIF as our seawall against the vicious flood.’ But suddenly Japanese planes were bombing the Westforce troops. There were men who escaped the prospect of long imprisonment that day, but only by becoming casualties. The Japanese were probing south of Gemas, and among the many Australians killed was Lieutenant P.W. Clemens, a Canberra public servant, twenty-three years old, shot through the heart.

The Indian units protecting Muar and the Australian guns were now surprised and nearly surrounded by numbers of the elite Japanese Guards Division, who had landed at various places either side of the crossing and the town. Lieutenant R. McLeod, from Bondi in Sydney, wrote, ‘Once the crossing had been made the untried Indians . . . were no match for the elite troops of the Japanese Army, especially as the secrecy and suddenness of the manoeuvre took the defenders by surprise.’ Another veteran Japanese force got into the rear of the Indian line and repeatedly ambushed the Indians and a regiment of the Norfolks. An unidentified Australian officer described the latter in terms that would eventually become true of Australian morale as well: ‘They [the Norfolks] were a fine body of men but almost dazed by the position in which they found themselves. Their training had been for open warfare, and not for the very close warfare of the Malayan countryside.’ They were also encumbered by ‘trunks, valises, baths, etc., all in the mud, much to the amusement of our lads’.

A withdrawal from the Muar area was ordered for one o’clock on 16 January, though the Australian batteries kept firing at the Muar ferry crossing until 8.30 p.m., when they were withdrawn along the coast road. The new position Westforce were to take up ran along a crossroads at a town named Bakri, and here armoured carriers and armoured cars operated with the infantry. On 18 January, the Japanese were beaten off.

Throughout the campaign, due to the lack of aerial reconnaissance, everyone on the Allied side, including General Bennett—who still believed he had the Japanese worked out—was unable to ascertain what was happening in terms of Japanese infiltration and flanking movements. The 29th Australian Battalion, for example, beat off an attack on the left flank of their position on the road to Bakri, pursued the enemy for some hundreds of metres, supported by a 25-pound gun manhandled into a new position by its crew, and attacked roadblocks just ahead. Carrier vehicles pushed to within a few metres of Japanese machine guns as men full of battle fury hacked into the Japanese roadblocks with axes. But as an officer wrote, ‘The enemy surrounded this ferocious little group.’ The Australians withdrew to a position by a bridge. Food and ammunition began to run out, as did morphine to treat the wounded.

The young university graduate/gunner Russell Braddon was part of a unit sent over the causeway to set up a mortar base on a hill named Bukit Langkap. They carried weapons and stores up its monsoon-slicked clay sides, dug trenches, established telephone lines and positioned the mortars, and were then ordered to abandon the place. After joining the retreat from the Muar River, they found the men of their supply column slaughtered. ‘I moved a leg off a case of beef and tried to forget it belonged to the most cheerful driver in our regiment.’

Braddon and his Westforce comrades had suffered the puncture of all their illusions. They had been told before that the Japanese were very small and myopic ‘and thus totally unsuited either physically or optically to tropical warfare . . . they had aeroplanes made from old kettles and kitchen utensils, guns salvaged from the war against Russia in 1905 and rifles of the kind used by civilised people only in films about the Red Indians. Also they were frightened of the dark.’ But during the retreat from Muar and when they reached a causeway above the paddy fields of Parit Sulong, one of Braddon’s friends declared, ‘They can see—which we were told they couldn’t. They can fight—which we were told they couldn’t. And they’re behind us for miles—which we were told they weren’t.’

By the time Gunner Braddon and his comrades had been digging in in Johor, the southernmost Malayan state, it was apparent that the good road system in the states of Selangor and Malacca had favoured the supplying of the Japanese troops as they advanced. But the Japanese units, as Bowden pointed out in a cable to Canberra on 23 January, did not depend on the road for food but only for military supplies. They lived off the country and could travel fast in jungle where there were no roads—especially down the east coast.

During the Muar River retreat, Captain Curlewis was sent out frequently in the dark to search for Australian units with whom General Bennett’s HQ had lost touch. By 22 January the retreat accelerated, and Curlewis wrote of ‘wild drives at night that no nightmare could envisage, bombings, machine gunning from the air, telephoning, message writing, orders to go out and do a job at a moment’s notice . . . Some day when the story of Malaya comes to be written some hard things will be said.’

Bowden was already saying them about the farcical and tragic air situation. Although fifty-two Hurricanes had arrived on 23 January, and thirty-two had been assembled, only thirteen were serviceable, because there were only a handful of pilots and ground crew available, and no spare parts.

Meanwhile, all down the length of Malaya there were many extraordinarily brave assaults at company or battalion level, and self-immolatory rearguard actions. On 19 January, Captain H.C. McDonald, a thirty-eight-year-old grazier from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, wounded while leading a withdrawal, handed over control of his men to a sergeant and gave covering fire to allow them to escape, at least for the moment. He would not be seen again. At the town of Parit Sulong, south of Bakri, many Australians in forward positions ran out of ammunition and prepared themselves in mind and spirit as best they could for the Japanese to surround them.

On 22 January, Lieutenant B.C. Hackney (who would survive the war) discussed with his friend Lieutenant A.H. Tibbetts, a young estate agent from Melbourne who would die that day, the desirability of having a wash, seeing that their clothes were covered in blood and filth. Appearing after a considerable time, the Japanese guards herded the wounded together with curses, kicks and blows from bayonets. The guardsmen were mothers’ sons but conditioned by a particular code; they were disciplined in battle and savage in victory. The Japanese military culture was one that warranted the humiliation, torture and massacre of prisoners, and later events in Australia would demonstrate that they expected no better when they were captured. In the frenzy of their successes, Japanese treatment of soldiers, male civilians and women was beyond all justification. But madness is readily achieved when a system condones it, and when victory intoxicates young minds.

During their misuse of Australian troops that day, as Hackney’s diary would claim and later testimony confirm, these Japanese troops deliberately targeted their kicks to the places where a wound lay open. One of the dead was placed in an upright position on a table top and treated as ‘an object of ridicule’. A Japanese officer arrived and demanded that helmets and mugs be filled with water, and cigarettes be offered to the Australians. This scene was photographed, but the water was then thrown away by the conquerors and the cigarettes taken back, and a massacre began for which the divisional commander, General Nishimura, would one day be called to international account and hanged.

There is a question which, in light of the massacre of the innocents, is both almost blasphemous but also necessary to ask. Given that the Japanese soldiers had had induced in them by their officers a hatred for the arrogance of the Empire and of the white man generally, and that this must now have played into their barbarities, had they been specifically indoctrinated about the White Australia Policy, about which Japan had first complained as early as 1905? We do not know the answer, though it would have been quite a propaganda tool for propagandists of the Japanese forces to let lie idle.

Severely wounded Lieutenant Hackney escaped from the massacre, hid in a coolie hut, cut through his bonds and met up on the track southwards with two members of his battalion, who both smelled strongly of petrol. By feigning death, they had avoided being fired on with the other prisoners. Petrol was thrown on the dead and wounded, and then ignited, but these two men, Sergeant Croft and his wounded companion, got away. Due to his injuries, Hackney had to stay at a Malay hut the next day while the other two men moved on. He managed to crawl from village to village until he was captured by Malayan policemen on 27 February and handed to the Japanese. The Malay villagers he met had been of course reluctant to help him for fear of reprisals.

THE FORTRESS FALLS

It is believed that General Bennett was already planning his escape to Australia as his troops retreated back over the causeway to Singapore. In his subsequent book, Why Singapore Fell, he is quite frank in admitting this. His intention to escape is not generally thought to have been a matter of cowardice but more a symptom of his self-importance, and of his belief that he knew better than any other general officer on the island how to fight the Japanese. It is also hard to avoid the idea that his ambitions to lead the AIF, something impossible to do from a POW camp, must have also had an unacknowledged part in his decision.

The Australians began the defence of Singapore on the night of 8 February 1942 at the extreme western end of Singapore, beyond the mouth of the Kranji River. Thinned out by the battles in Johor, they took up positions around the inlets and rivers with orders to rebuff Japanese landings. Only the most hopeful could have said their numbers—even with recently arrived but nearly untrained replacements—were adequate, or that the jungle favoured a coherent line, but still they dug in their machine guns behind strands of wire. Flares were to be fired as the Japanese came ashore, to signal to the artillery behind the coast to start firing. But the flares were too swollen by humidity to fit in the Very pistols designed to fire them.

As waves of Japanese got ashore, wearing compasses on their wrists to guide them, the Australians were obviously outnumbered. The replacements amongst them found the artillery barrage and the flashes of light awful and bewildering. A Japanese commentator declared of the combat that night: ‘Words cannot describe the glorious hand grenade and hand-to-hand fighting encountered.’ In the meantime, Australian reinforcements moving up in the dark and amidst the jungles and marshes became disoriented and were reduced to small vulnerable parties, discussing in great anguish what to do and where to move. A fighting withdrawal occurred during the next day, and the airfield at Tengah was lost. The lack of air cover for his troops was such in any case that Percival wrote, ‘Why, I ask myself, does Britain, our improvident Britain, with all her great resources, allow her sons to fight without air support?’

The Australians drew up in a new line in the morning, but that night, 9 February, the Japanese Guards Division landed in the north-west sector. In their retreat, the Australians blew up oil tanks at the mouth of a creek named Mendai Kechil. The burning fuel spread onto the water, and the screams of a battalion of Japanese guards who were still in boats added to the horrors of the night. To the east the Indians were driven away from the naval base that stood for the hollow promises of Britain and the hollow hopes of Australia. By the night of 10 February, the Indians, Australians, Scots and Malays were directly to the west of the city of Singapore, formed up along the northward-running Reformatory Road, and only six kilometres or so from the outskirts of the city. Over the next day and a half, enemy tanks pushed these forces, and the Scots of the 2nd Gordons, away from the town of Bukit Timah, virtually the geographic centre of the island, further eroding the situation. The 26th Australian Battalion, who had been fighting the Japanese in plantations and jungles and were now being sent forward, were suddenly advancing amongst the elegant villas of Tyersall Park, an unreal venue for war. But these were the last habitations many of them saw, since they were soon victims of shelling and bombing. From Kallang airport, covered with bomb craters, only two Hurricane fighters had been operating, but now they were ordered to fly out to the Netherlands East Indies.

The Australians in the battle for Singapore had now been fighting for the better part of five days, and in that time had been able to get only a few hours’ sleep—in the case of Brigadier General Harold Taylor of the 8th Division, fewer than five hours in as many days. When the 13th Australian General Hospital fell to the Japanese, the wounded were taken prisoner in the face of the all-pervasive fears of massacre. But massacre did not occur. By daybreak on 14 February, the Australians occupied a salient centred on Tanglin Barracks. Bennett sent a message to Curtin that implied the possibility of surrendering: ‘If enemy enters city behind us will take suitable action to avoid unnecessary sacrifices.’ Indeed, by now the War Council in Singapore had ceased to function and many of its members were escaping or had already done so. Duff Cooper, Churchill’s Cabinet representative, had flown to Java, and thence to safety.

The pressure on the perimeter continued through that and the next day, as did the bombing of the city. On 15 February, rumours of a ceasefire and even of surrender were exchanged amongst troops. If they had not done so already, soldiers in the port and close to the coast began to consider escape. At the conference of commanders, held in a tunnel under the city that day, Percival decided with unanimous support to seek a ceasefire and to invite a Japanese deputation to discuss the terms for capitulation. Fighting continued north and south around the city while the joint ceasefire deputation walked out northwest along the Bukit Timah Road about 1 p.m.

So, on the afternoon of 15 February 1942, the Japanese were amazed to see a white flag appear in the line of forts outside Singapore. General Percival was seeking a truce. What astonished and delighted Yamashita was that, to that moment, the Japanese had been suffering casualties under bombardment from forts Changi and Canning. The defenders, however, were short of food, water and ammunition. The pumping of water from the reservoir feeding the besieged and bombed city had ended when the reservoir was captured. In the devastated city, Chinese women sat in ruins howling for their dead children. Bennett, returning to his headquarters from a despairing conference at Fort Canning, could barely make his way through the rubbled street: ‘Beneath was a crushed mass of old men, women, young and old.’

A later British report would declare that behaviour by undisciplined Australian troops within the city was one of the factors that caused Percival to seek a truce. The same report did not emphasise that two-thirds of the ten thousand dead and wounded in the campaign were Australians. Certainly, troops pooled in the besieged city in at best bewilderment, and at worst riot. British or Australian soldiers, with rifles and Tommy guns had on 14 February tried to capture the launch on which Bowden, the Australian civilian representative, was escaping Singapore Harbour with others, even firing on it as it pulled out. All this while, to the west of the city, around Tanglin Barracks, the most pitiable acts of valour and hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye killing were taking place in the dark, one Australian soldier trying to beat off Japanese attackers with a machine-gun tripod.

At the Japanese 5th Division lines, Percival was told to go on with his staff to the Ford Motor Factory in Bukit Timah for a meeting with Yamashita. The surrender terms imposed in a small factory office by Yamashita, partly in bluff and on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, were severe—an unconditional surrender to occur at 8.30 p.m. Singapore time. Yamashita himself needed peace because of his resupply difficulties, but Percival was psychologically defeated anyhow and not fit to call the Tiger’s bluff.

That afternoon Bennett ordered that his men should be supplied with new clothing and two days’ rations, and went on a tour of the Australian lines. He handed over his command to Brigadier Black Jack Galleghan, and then left to plan his escape for that night. Captain Curlewis, invited to join the escape party, expressed doubts to Major Charles Moses, future fabled leader of the ABC and also part of Bennett’s party, about the morality of leaving his men. Curlewis stayed, for honour’s sake, and became a prisoner.

Over previous and subsequent days, the seas between Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies were crowded with small vessels full of civilians, soldiers and nurses making southwards. The nurses had been the staff of the 13th Australian Hospital and were under orders to leave. The vessel Vyner Brooke, which set out from Singapore on 12 February, included amongst its passengers sixty-four nurses. The vessel was bombed and sunk off the island of Bangka on the afternoon of 14 February. Two of the nurses were killed by the bombing, nine drifted off and were lost, and twenty-two landed with other military and civilian survivors on the north coast of Bangka. The other thirty-two were rounded up on various beaches and became prisoners. On 16 February, when it was found that the Japanese were in possession of the island, an officer walked into the nearby town of Muntok to negotiate a surrender. Civilians, including children, also walked to the town, but the nurses stayed to care for wounded Australian and British soldiers.

Ten Japanese soldiers, led by an officer, came to take away the walking wounded, carried them into the jungle and returned wiping their bayonets and cleaning their rifles. The nurses were ordered to walk into the sea and, supporting two sisters already injured in the sinking of the Vyner Brooke, were machined-gunned. All but one were killed. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel of Broken Hill, twenty-six years of age and tall, was shot not through the heart but through the diaphragm, the bullet continuing through her body and exiting. She emerged from the drifting heap of dead and for three days remained at large, hiding in a fisherman’s hut and nursing a British soldier named Kingsley who had lost part of an arm and been bayoneted in the abdomen, and who died of his wounds. Now she was found and taken prisoner again. She concealed her wound as best she could for fear that if her captors knew what she had witnessed they would certainly execute her. The time would come when she would give evidence at the war crimes tribunals in Tokyo, but for the next three years or more her rights as a world citizen would be cancelled.

The Mary Rose, a launch carrying Bowden, Australia’s good and wise servant, and his staff, left Singapore Harbour on the night of 14 February. Before dawn on 17 February, in the Bangka Strait between Bangka Island and Sumatra, searchlights from Japanese patrol boats detected the craft. Those on board Mary Rose were reduced to using a pair of spare underpants as a flag of surrender, and the prisoners were taken to Muntok Harbour, Bangka Island, where they were locked in a warehouse with other would-be escapees. The elderly, white-haired Bowden insisted to a guard that he be allowed to speak to an officer about his diplomatic status. An argument developed over Bowden’s gold wristwatch. Another guard arrived and the two of them escorted Bowden outside. They made him dig his own grave and shot him at its edge.

The dividing line between desertions and escapes was one that plagued Bennett and many other soldiers for the rest of their lives. Since there had been a report in Singapore that the surrender occurred in the late afternoon of 15 February to take effect that night, many believed they were within military rules and, indeed, faced with the military imperative to initiate their escape in the time interval. On the night of the surrender, General Bennett and Major Moses, with some local planters who had been serving in the volunteer forces, commandeered a native craft and reached the east coast of Sumatra. They made their way across the island to Padang, were then flown south to Java and Batavia (Djakarta or Jakarta), and travelled by a Qantas plane to Australia. When Bennett reached Melbourne and reported to the Chief of General Staff, General Sturdee, ‘To my dismay, my reception was cold and hostile.’ Sturdee told him that his escape was ill advised. The Chief of Staff, like the General Staff, like the nation and like Curtin, was shocked at the scale of losses. In total, including killed and imprisoned, the Australian military losses came to eighteen thousand soldiers and innumerable civilians, all within a span of days.

The implications for Australia seemed illimitably horrifying.

DAYS OF BRAINS AND BRAWN

Australians had to accept some responsibility for their gullibility over many years in the matter of Singapore and its capacity to protect itself and Australia. Now, however, they needed to act. On 15 February, the day of Singapore’s capitulation, General Sturdee again called Curtin to insist that troops urgently be brought home from the Middle East. Singapore was only hours away from falling. Roosevelt put some pressure on Churchill to agree to allow the Australians to leave North Africa: ‘It seems to me that we must at all costs maintain our two flanks—the right based on Australia and New Zealand, and the left on Burma, India and China.’ Churchill misemphasised this message of Roosevelt’s to push the idea that Australia’s first duty was not the defence of itself but of Burma, a front that would within a short time prove as futile as Singapore had.

On the day Singapore fell, the Reverend Hector Harrison had invited Curtin to speak at the rededication of a Presbyterian church founded by pioneers on the road to Yass in New South Wales. Curtin’s mistress, Belle Southwell, was also there, because the church was on Southwell land. In that idyllic pastoral scene (dry as the pastures were at the end of a drought), Curtin the agnostic saw an encapsulation of that precious Australianness which was now imperilled. When he spoke to the assembled people he was edgy, but the tropes of his normal oratory kicked in, and he declared that the ‘fatherhood of God was closely related to the brotherhood of man’.

It was early the next morning when confirmation of Singapore’s surrender reached Canberra, where Curtin declared the event ‘Australia’s Dunkirk’. He immediately sat down to write to Churchill demanding the return of the Australian troops from the Mediterranean. Churchill would try everything to prevent it, enlisting the aid of Stanley Melbourne Bruce at Australia House and of Earle Page, Australia’s representative on the British War Cabinet. Churchill was disgruntled that Curtin had talked him into sending the British 18th Division to Singapore just in time for it to be eaten whole, when it could have been sent to Burma (and thus ultimately eaten whole there); this increased Churchill’s determination to fight Curtin over the return of Australian troops.

But Curtin, beneath a less thunderous exterior than Churchill’s, had an equal if not greater determination in the matter. Though later historians would very much doubt that the Japanese intended to invade the huge continent of Australia, believing that they hoped instead to bomb the crucial Australian cities in a manner that would destroy the war effort and sap Australia’s enthusiasm for the American alliance, Curtin believed—as did his fellow Australians—that invasion was the Japanese plan, and that the harshness shown in other places by the Japanese army would descend on the Australian populace. A day of prayer after the fall of Singapore involved hundreds of thousands of Australians in an appeal to God during the morning hours, and in a start on the digging of their own backyard air-raid shelters during the afternoon.

Australian troops serving overseas themselves felt an immediate need to return to the Pacific area. Thousands of Australian aircrewmen were campaigning far from home. One of them, pilot Jerry Judd, had a father who was in the 8th Division and now a hostage to fortune. Ordinary Seaman Roy Hall was training in Portsmouth Barracks, ‘and there was a great deal of anxiety and agitation about the whole thing, and many of the men there volunteered to go back to Australia because that’s where they felt they should be’. Niall Brennan, Melbourne Irish, had always doubted the Imperial proposition: ‘A lot of us had felt for a long time that we had been misled, that the whole idea of supporting the Empire . . . because Britain would come to help us if we needed it, that that was hogwash.’ Ken Hall, the filmmaker and head of Cinesound Newsreel, noticed that in some quarters there was considerable concern when Curtin said that he looked to America. ‘But what was Britain to do for us,’ Hall asked, ‘when they were at their wits’ end trying to save themselves? . . . Menzies was so utterly British, bowing the knee and touching the forelock and all that stuff. We were already a nation but Menzies didn’t want us to be a nation, he wanted us to be an appendix to the British, which was all wrong for policy.’

Merv Lilley, a rural worker in Queensland, who had not thought of joining up to defend the Empire, now decided to do so for Australia’s sake. Enlisted, he was given an old service rifle from World War I ‘that didn’t throw true any longer’. Spanish Civil War volunteer and leading figure in the Australian Communist Party, Laurie Aarons, whose home had been raided—along with the homes of all Australian Communists—in 1940 (during a phase when those who had not left the party over the pact then in force, between Hitler and Stalin, or even those who had been expelled from it, were considered traitorous), was working in a boot factory but also went down to the recruiting depot in Woolloomooloo, though he would be rejected.

Cole Nowlan, a soldier in Darwin, was sent off with a detachment to arrest Japanese on the pearling luggers in the harbour and to send them to an internment camp in Adelaide. The leading photographer in Darwin, Morikami, was Japanese. Because he had a camera he was now considered doubly suspicious and was part of the round-up.

Canberra, a bush town still, suddenly became an epicentre of the struggle against Japanese militarism. In a pharmacy in New South Wales the day after Singapore fell, the author, then six, witnessed a woman possibly no more than forty years old burst into tears while waiting at the counter. Australian women did not easily weep in public then—it was still considered bad form. But the times were exceptional. Her friend told the pharmacy girl, ‘You have to forgive Mrs Ellis. Her son was in Singapore.’

The Australians went on shopping and seeking each other’s society, but the reality—that the world had changed, and that Deakin’s vision of Australia could well be gobbled up in a matter of days or weeks—riveted the country as it had never been riveted before, and filled the individual hearts of men and women with terror, and the communal heart with a chancy resolve. The great social laboratory that Australians believed their Commonwealth to be might now vanish within days. ‘The fall of Singapore opens the battle of Australia,’ said Curtin in a press statement. ‘He would be a very dull person who could not discard all his preconceived ideas of strategy and war, and who does not accept the fall of Singapore as involving a completely new situation . . . The days of bets and beer are gone, the days of brains and brawn have come.’

In her flat in Sydney’s Darlinghurst Road, Dame Mary Gilmore—survivor of William Lane’s Paraguay settlement and a rare case of a royally honoured radical—expressed outrage at British incompetence and Japanese militarism.

Whose was the fault she betrayed our troops?
Whose was the fault she failed!?
Ask it of those who lowered the flag
At once to the mast was nailed,
Tell them we’ll raise it on Anzac soil
With hearts that are steeled to the core
We swear by our dead and captive sons
REVENGE FOR SINGAPORE!

Revenge would be slow. When the Pacific War erupted there were two Australian armies: the volunteer AIF, 152,000 strong and mainly serving overseas, and the conscript Home Army of 213,000, only half of whom were serving full time because there wasn’t enough military equipment to put the whole of the conscriptees under arms. Even fully manned units lacked transport or modern weapons, as did both the navy and the RAAF.

The Curtin government sought volunteers from the conscript militia for service in the territory of New Guinea, as the Defence Act 1903 forbade the use of the conscript troops in an overseas conflict. By January 1942 a militia brigade had been deployed to Port Moresby but it still lacked basic equipment. A leavening of experienced AIF officers and non-commissioned officers were injected into the brigade. Too many of the Port Moresby garrison were used labouring on the wharf or building fixed defences for them to be properly trained. It was not until 21 March that an RAAF fighter squadron arrived, the 75th Squadron. It would be steadily worn down through attrition of aircraft and exhaustion of pilots. A further militia brigade was sent to Port Moresby, and another to Milne Bay at the eastern end of New Guinea. AIF brigades from the veteran 7th Division would follow later in the year. Now the 39th Militia Battalion was slated to begin the march along the track to Kokoda to occupy Buna, but the Japanese would get there first.

This Kokoda trail, soon to acquire its capital letter, was built in the New Guinean manner, in that it connected villages that were on high ground, one to the other, and was designed for the passage of one person at a time. Having reached a mountain, it then descended into a valley and climbed up the next ridge. And so it went, on and on. A pre-war Papuan administration report on the trail held that white men could not carry loads, and natives would have to be limited to seven kilograms each. It was not good in the rain, yet most of the coming mountain campaign would be fought in the wet season.

Papuan carriers, conscripted and controlled by Papuan administration patrol officers now turned soldiers, were the lifeline for the troops struggling against an enemy superior in training, numbers and weapons. The Papuans also carried out many of the wounded or sick, eight carriers to each stretcher. But many of the sick and wounded had to crawl their way back to the road head outside Port Moresby.

BOMBING NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

On 19 February, just days after the fall of Singapore, Japanese bombers, fighter-bombers and fighters appeared in huge numbers over Darwin, bombing town and port. The naval task force was based on four aircraft carriers under Vice-Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, who had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor. After these aircraft had spread ruin and flown off, the Australian government did not dare tell citizens how many enemy planes were involved, how many bombs were dropped or how many casualties there were. But in the suburbs and country towns of Australia, the very fact that it had happened created a further sense of terror and of imminence.

Earlier that morning, six Hudsons from the RAAF’s Number 2 Squadron had taken off from a landing strip in Timor, abandoning their base according to orders they had received, and made for Darwin. As these bombers approached Darwin, anti-aircraft guns in Fannie Bay opened fire on them. They had survived to land at the Darwin military airfield, and considered that sufficient action for the day. A Catalina flying boat commanded by an American officer, Thomas Moorer, was by then patrolling the coast of Bathurst Island. He had experienced Pearl Harbor and had taken off during that raid to save his plane. Now nine Japanese Zero fighters descended on him and shot his plane to ribbons. He crash-landed in the sea with half his crew wounded, but all were rescued by the passing freighter Florence D. Moorer had not had time to warn Darwin by radio.

The eleven fighters available on the day to defend Darwin were there by accident—nine Kittyhawks of the US 33rd Pursuit Squadron who had taken off for Timor, on their way to join the fight against the Japanese in Java, but were being forced back to Darwin by adverse weather. Two had needed servicing and stayed behind. Coastwatchers on Bathurst and Melville islands were the first to see the Japanese air fleet on its way. But when the message was sent to Darwin, RAAF intelligence concluded that what was seen were the nine returning Kittyhawks. The intelligence staff officer, Lieutenant-Commander J.C.B. McManus, wanted to sound the alarm at once but was overruled by the RAAF. The nine American Kittyhawks were indeed returning to Darwin from the west, but at about the same time as the mass Zeros, ‘Kates and Vals’ were arriving. The Japanese raiders were led by Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had earlier led the raid on Pearl Harbor.

One of the returning US Kittyhawks, flown by Lieutenant Jack Peres, was shot down and crashed fifteen kilometres north of Darwin. Lieutenant William Walker, wounded badly in the left shoulder, landed his plane at the RAAF field and ran to a trench; glancing over its rim, he saw his aircraft destroyed by the Zeros now attacking the airstrip. Another pilot was forced to abandon his plane, and Lieutenant Oestreicher, who had taken off in his re-serviced Kittyhawk, was the lone Allied plane in the sky facing an enemy fleet that included thirty-six Zeros, seventy-one ‘Val’ dive bombers and eighty-one ‘Kate’ bombers, and would survive being surrounded by those numbers.

Captain Fuchida had led this armada in over Adams Bay to the east of Darwin, circled over the land, and then attacked Darwin Harbour from the south. The American squadron leader, Floyd Pell, was already on the ground at the RAAF airfield and ordered the five Kittyhawks who had managed to land to take off again at once. He was only five and a half metres above the runway when he was attacked by three Zeros; he was forced to bail and somehow survived the parachute descent. A Zero machine-gunned him to death when he landed. A second aircraft was blown up while ascending. A third gained altitude but was immediately set upon, its pilot forced to parachute into the mangroves. A fourth was destroyed. The fifth crash-landed, cartwheeling and shattering into pieces, but the pilot was rescued. In total, nine Kittyhawks were blown out of the sky or destroyed when barely off the ground.

The heavy anti-aircraft guns manned by Australian soldiers opened fire. It was a new experience for them. In light of the acute national scarcity of all means of defence, they had fired only a few practice rounds in their entire military career. The fuses were wrongly set and were affected by humidity. Lewis machine guns also came into largely ineffectual use, similarly .303 rifles. The first Japanese plane to be brought down was a Zero that crashed near the navy’s shore base at Coonawarra, about ten kilometres east of the town, and the credit was given to a Lewis gunner, Darky Hudson. ‘Up his arse! Up his arse!’ cried a gunner in encouragement as another Zero was hit and exploded somewhat closer to town. At the RAAF field, which served chiefly as a way station for planes going on to the Netherlands East Indies to deal with the Japanese, Wing Commander Archie Tindal sat on the edge of a trench firing a Vickers gun at the Vals and Zeros flying low. He and other defenders could see pilots smiling at the ease of their targets. Tindal was shot through the throat and killed by a bullet from one of the planes as daisy-cutter bombs threw shrapnel across the airfield.

The number of Japanese aircraft shot down was in the single digits. One Zero brought down was piloted by Petty Officer Hajime Toyoshimi, who would crash-land on Melville Island and be captured by a Tiwi Islander to become Australia’s first Japanese prisoner of war; later in the war he would take part in a notorious POW uprising.

One contingent of aircraft dropped their bombs along the Esplanade. A blast wrecked Darwin Post Office. The postmaster, Hurtle Bald, with the help of one of his postal workers, had dug a slit trench behind the post-office building. When the aircraft arrived, he took to the trench with his wife Alice, his daughter, two of his sisters, his clerk, and a number of young female telegraphers. A direct hit killed them all—as well as wiping out military communication—and police saw that the horrors of modern aerial bombing that had begun at Guernica, or maybe earlier in China and Abyssinia, were exemplified by the naked body of one of the fatally concussed dead girls hanging in a tree. The residence of the administrator of the Northern Territory was hit, and a young Larrakiah woman, Daisy Martin, who worked as a maid, was killed.

Meg Ewart and her colleagues at Darwin’s military hospital moved those patients who were able to walk out to the slit trenches in the hospital grounds. Those too ill to be moved were put under their beds, mattresses and all. Ewart shared that day the same apprehensions as Curtin’s Cabinet: ‘Another thing I think too that we did feel, was that there wouldn’t have been a raid like that unless the Japanese were going to follow it on land, and that wasn’t a very happy thought either.’

The auxiliary minesweeper HMAS Gunbar had been passing through the opened boom net protecting the entrance to Darwin Harbour, in sleepy, tropical air, when the sky had filled instantaneously with wheeling, diving and strafing Zero aircraft. Bombs from one wave of Val dive bombers split the long, vulnerable wharf in two, killing at least twenty-one wharf labourers, paid-up members of the Australian Workers’ Union. Men were marooned on the harbour end of the wharf, with the ships they had been working on, the cargo ships Neptuna, which contained two hundred depth charges, and Barossa, similarly full of high explosive and oil. A bomb shattered Neptuna’s bridge and entered the saloon where crew and some wharf labourers were waiting out the shock of the attack. Forty-five of them were killed. A bomb that fell on the recreation shed killed men who had been having morning tea, or, as it was called then, ‘smoko’. Many wharfies and ships’ crew dived into the harbour for safety, where a railway locomotive and six trucks had already arrived, blown off the wharf. Oil from punctured supply lines running ashore filled the water.

Also in the harbour were the seaplane tender USS William D. Preston, the destroyer USS Peary, the Australian corvettes HMAS Deloraine and Katoomba, the sloop HMAS Swan, the depot ship HMAS Platypus and the above-mentioned auxiliary minesweeper HMAS Gunbar, which were all armed, and the unarmed hospital ship Manunda. HMAS Swan was tied up beside Neptuna and quickly cast off and headed for open water. HMAS Katoomba could not move since it was in the floating dock being refitted, but it had many machine guns on board which were now manned.

The USS Peary was a veteran of the early assaults on the Philippines, and its crew had already been attacked in the open Pacific earlier in 1942 with torpedoes and bombs. Peary had unluckily been put into Darwin early that morning to pick up fuel, and its commander was wary, getting fuelled up as quickly as he could and hoping to leave harbour soon, when the Japanese planes appeared. A number of bombs fell on the destroyer, including one that landed in the ammunitions store. A seaman on the nearby William D. Preston later remembered that his own flesh was seared by the fury of the fire aboard Peary.

The blazing and doomed Peary had got underway though, dragging herself towards open water, firing. She sank quickly, still in the harbour, and more than a hundred of the crew died of wounds and burns or were drowned. The William D. Preston was badly damaged too. Even now people were putting out into the harbour in rowboats and dropping other small craft into the water to go out and rescue people.

It is not known whether Japanese aircraft deliberately or indeliberately hit the Manunda, a veteran hospital ship that had made four journeys to and from the Middle East to repatriate the wounded. It was true that Manunda was moored fairly close to Peary, yet it seemed to all witnesses that it was deliberately targeted. A near-miss killed with shrapnel four men on Manunda’s deck. The ship then suffered a direct hit, and its crew quarters and navigation instruments were destroyed by the impact. Thirty men had been blown into the harbour and were now retrieved, all with burns. A nurse, Margaret de Mestre, was killed, and thirty-three men died from wounds and burns either then or soon after. In the wards, as the damaged and burned were brought in to join the more than 260 military casualties already on board, Matron Shumack exercised a calm control over treatment.

The first raid over, Group Captain Scherger at the RAAF base ordered his three undamaged Hudsons to go out on a preliminary search to strike at the aircraft carriers from which the Japanese planes had come. He also had Wirraways and A24 American dive bombers to the south in Batchelor, but with telephonic communication wiped out there was no ground-to-air communication with them or the Hudsons. Scherger tried desperately to put communications in place but would not manage it before another raid began, this time by heavy bombers, sent out from the Celebes Islands and the airstrip on Ambon for whose sake a battalion of young Australians had been sacrificed.

By afternoon the raids were over, but people took the road south to Adelaide River by any means they could. Although the exodus from Darwin would later be called the Adelaide River Stakes, the impulse to flee the town before the Japanese struck again seems reasonable enough, based on the number of planes, the volume of explosives, and the incapacity of the defence. Because of a confusion of orders, many RAAF men joined the exodus, hitching rides on army vehicles; one man actually turned up in Melbourne thirteen days later. George Telfer, a civilian working south of Darwin, saw the bombers go over for the second attack. In his utility truck he and a companion made towards what is now the Stuart Highway and before long met ‘the outgoing people from Darwin—motor cars, people on foot, people with handcarts, this mass of people moving south, getting out of town’. One of the trucks was the night-soil vehicle, the legendary dunny wagon.

Two hundred and fifty-two Allied soldiers and civilians were killed that day. The two 19 February raids would be followed by sixty-two further raids on the town, in April, June, July and November that year and extending well into the following year. And it was not only Darwin that saw enemy planes. On 3 March 1942, Broome in Western Australia was attacked. The day before, a number of Dutch flying boats had landed in Broome with Dutch evacuees from Java and elsewhere. Many of the passengers were exhausted and stayed in Broome overnight, and when the refugees returned on board the next morning, yearning for the relative safety of southern cities, a flight of Zeros swept in across the tropical sky and sank every such aircraft in the bay. A Dutch pilot named Guy Winkel, waiting to refuel, discovered there was no RAAF plane at all in Broome to resist the Zeros overhead. During the attack he fired one of the machine guns on his aircraft, the sole riposte to the Japanese empire. Later he expressed the view that the Japanese could have taken Broome with twelve soldiers, and he was probably right.

Eighty-eight people were killed that day in Broome. Women and children had already moved out, but after the attack the remaining civil servants, including the police, took to the road. ‘And you can understand the panic,’ said Ralph Doig, a Western Australian public servant. ‘Nobody then in Australia had previous experience of being bombed like that . . . there was no defence against [the Japanese].’ Similar attacks occurred on Wyndham, Port Hedland and Derby in Western Australia, as well as Katherine in the Northern Territory, and Townsville and Mossman in Queensland. These raids were not seen by Australians as a substitute for invasion, but as a prelude to it.

Darwin’s bombing signified to Australians even more emphatically an enemy’s desire to invade their country. But modern historians declare that Japan’s aim was in fact to create a defensive rim around the region where all the riches lay—the raw materials of the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya and elsewhere. Thus the Japanese, like the Dutch in the seventeenth century, had an interest in the boundary lands of Australia but not in its complete possession.

THE JAPAN–AUSTRALIA SOCIETY

The Depression had left Australia on the verge of bankruptcy by 1931, and only Japanese wool and wheat purchases that year helped ease the mounting economic crisis of capital. By 1934–35, Japanese purchases of Australian wool and wheat rivalled those of Britain. On this basis of Australian trade interests, the Japan–Australia Society was formed, and its membership included leaders of the pastoral, finance, retail, brewing, mining and shipping interests.

It was particularly Japan’s attempted conquest of China that created a new market for Australian wool, wheat and metals. This Japanese aggression drew little protest from Australian business or from conservative governments. In fact, many leaders of business took a vocal pro-Japanese stand in 1936, when a trade diversion controversy began. British capital, such as film distributors, and textile and automobile manufacturers demanded that their government put pressure on the Australian government to ensure their markets in Australia were protected from American and Japanese competition. The Lyons coalition government put in place barriers to the United States and the Japanese, and in return America and Japan introduced a boycott of Australian exports. In the meantime, Sydney’s pastoral, retail and banking interests condemned the trade diversion policy, especially as it applied to trade with Japan. In 1936, a Japanese company, Nippon Steel, attempted to establish operations to mine and export iron ore from Yampi Sound off Western Australia. The Lyons government declared that iron deposits in the Pilbara were limited and that extraction was not in Australia’s interest. Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was willing to export scrap iron to Japan but not to allow a Japanese competitor to threaten its monopoly over iron ore. Members of the Japan–Australia Society criticised the Federal government’s denial of a Japanese company’s right to mine in Australia. Had Japan succeeded in its application, not only would its reliance upon BHP have ended, but it would have established a foothold in northern Australia.

From 1929 until 1941, the Japanese consulate in Bligh Street, Sydney, commanded an intelligence network which easily amassed information about Australian economics, politics and society and promoted friendship between Japan and the city’s elite. The Japan–Australia Society came into being because of the benefits of Australian trade with Japan, as well as for the sake of interest in Japanese society and culture on the part of many intellectuals and academics. When Percy Spender, barrister and minister stood for the federal seat of Manly—as an independent and soon-to-be United Australia Party member—he was given support by some of the businessmen involved with the society. As Minister for the Army, at a time when many were not yet fully convinced of the threat from Japan, he permitted a Japanese army officer, Major Hashida, to tour BHP in Newcastle and Port Kembla. Hashida’s intelligence reports were a factor in allowing the withdrawal of Japanese assets from Australia some weeks before hostilities began in the Pacific, but many reasonable people thought Spender’s permission to Hashida was not reckless. Indeed, Adrian Curlewis, a lawyer and army officer who would soon be a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, would mention in passing to an English-speaking officer, that he had been a functionary of the Japan–Australia Society.

The Port Kembla Pig Iron Strike of 1938–39 had rallied Sydney’s pro-Japanese leaders. They condemned the fight of the wharf labourers to refuse to load a cargo of pig iron bound for Japan because of the wharfies’ belief it would be converted into bombs and bullets to kill Chinese in Japan’s invasion of China. The wharf labourers had seen in their local cinema the footage of what the Japanese had done to the population of Nanking. Members of the Japan–Australia Society urged the Lyons government to break the strike, and the scrap iron was eventually shipped to Japan.

The influence of Japan did not stop at business leaders, however. During the 1930s, Japanese intelligence sought out and gained support from senior Australian intelligence officers such as Colonel John Prentice, who was also a Sydney radio broadcaster. Prentice convinced another radio celebrity, Charles Cousens, a disgraced former officer in the British Indian army, to work with Kenno Suki Sato, a Japanese journalist and intelligence agent, on a joint Japanese–Australian magazine that would carry articles on Australian businessmen prominent in relations between the two countries. During the later Pacific War, Sato would boast to Australian prisoners of war at Ofuna Camp near Tokyo that he had been chosen as the chief civil administrator of a Japanese-controlled Australia. Sato was certain that had Cousens administered Australia, ‘many leading Australians would have been willing co-operators’.

Charles Cousens was a frequent visitor to the Japanese consulate before the war. Later, as an officer in the Australian army after the Allied surrender at Singapore, Cousens volunteered to assist the Japanese rather than remain in Changi. Before sailing to Japan, Cousens explained to his captors that if Japan invaded Australia he could be parachuted into Australian-held territory to negotiate a separate peace between Australia and Japan. Given money and his own Tokyo apartment, Cousens instructed Tokyo Rose and other broadcasters in the art of radio propaganda. After the war, he was arrested by the Australians and charged with treason, but the case was not proved and he returned to his civilian occupation as a radio broadcaster.

Major Jack Scott, a Great War veteran and Old Guard commander in chief, was also a leading friend of Japan in Sydney. Had New South Wales premier Jack Lang refused to go on his dismissal in 1932, it was Scott who was to enforce the Old Guard plan to drive Lang from office and install a military dictatorship. In 1934, Scott was invited to travel to Japan and the recently captured Manchukuo (Manchuria), and assess its social and economic development. After a two-week tour, both Scott and F.H. Cutlack, an Australian intelligence officer and senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist, praised the Japanese experiment in occupied China for its social order and commercial progress.

Returned to Australia, Scott would pay a number of agents—including such members of Australia First as the Pankhurst-Walshes, John Sleeman (journalist, former ally and biographer of Jack Lang) and Inky Stephensen—for their services to Japan. In early 1941, now a lieutenant-colonel, Scott was appointed commander of the independent company Gull Force, whose mission was to harass Japanese forces occupying the island of Ambon. Believing his troops to be overwhelmed, he surrendered. As a prisoner of war on Hainan Island off China, Scott was separated from the other Gull Force prisoners, who despised him for his arrogance and for handing over several of his men for punishment.

Inky Stephensen and a number of other members of his Australia First organisation were imprisoned during the war. Stephensen had been subsidised by Japan for his pre-Pearl Harbor denunciation of British and American imperialism, his isolationism, and his group of pro-Japan lobbyists. The selective arrest and internment of Australia First members left many more influential friends of Japan free of any stain.

With the arrest of the Australia First members, the search for traitors ended. Even so, Professor E.P. Alchin, a University of Sydney anthropologist and a member of the Prime Minister’s Morale Committee, sent a memo to Curtin expressing his view that ‘many in the Sydney business community believed a Japanese take-over was inevitable and arrangements to cooperate with them should be made immediately’.

Later events made Alchin’s panic and perhaps the willingness to collaborate on the part of others an historical irrelevance.

IN THE WAKE OF BOMBS

A young public servant named Gladys Joyce, who worked as secretary to the prime minister, was in Sydney at a teleprinter receiving news of shipping that had been destroyed during the Darwin raid. She typed up for Curtin a list of the damage, the nine ships sunk and the twenty aircraft destroyed. Australia was an intimate place then. There was an intimacy to Parliament itself and to the room where the Advisory War Council met. (The cleaners of the new Parliament House in Canberra as it exists at the time this book was written have a bigger office than most 1942 Cabinet members.) Unwitting about Darwin, the council was meeting under the chairmanship of the quiet but crafty Queenslander and Deputy Prime Minister Frank Forde to discuss the return of the Australian troops from the Middle East and how they should be deployed. Many conservative members of the council wanted them sent to Burma, as did Churchill. Jack Beasley, former Lang supporter and now Minister for Supply and Development, had left the room for some reason and came back yelling, ‘The Japs have bombed Darwin! That settles it!’

The washed-out and ailing Curtin issued a statement announcing the first battle on Australian soil and invoking the idea of racial sturdiness as an Australian quality. The armed forces and the civilians of Darwin, said Curtin (not knowing whether it was true or not), had ‘comported themselves with the gallantry that is traditional in the people of our stock’. Though it would be grossly unfair to accuse Curtin of fascist ideology in any way, the suspect concept of ‘stock’ was inherent in the culture of the time. Curtin hoped an almost mythical Australia would survive because of its good and cherished stock. Churchill believed it would fall because of its bad stock.

The young United Australia politician from Western Australia, Paul Hasluck, noticed that unlike the supposed coolness under fire of the people in Darwin, government ministers were ‘in a state of jitters’. Again, the attack on Darwin was seen not merely as part of a bombing and containment policy that would keep the Australians and Americans busy on Australian soil, but as a sign of an imminent invasion. In backyards, men continued to work on their air-raid shelters. Arthur Martin of Leichhardt in Sydney, whose eldest child, Max, was determined to fly and had gone straight from Balmain Christian Brothers into air force training, wielded his shovel energetically to make a shelter for his family. He, like other fathers, had no conception that ultimately these homemade bunkers would become cubbyhouses for his children.

Dorothy Hewett, later a nationally revered writer, then a university student, described girls threatening to take a cyanide pill if Perth were invaded, but no cyanide pills were being offered around. Joan Comer, a soldier’s wife from Gulgong in New South Wales, was told by her doctor about the yellow contraceptive sponge sure to be issued women to prevent pregnancies from rapes committed by the invader. Mick Coyle, an engine driver on the north coast of New South Wales, was shown a revolver by his fireman, who explained that he would shoot his wife and daughters when the Japanese marched in. Young university student Niall Brennan in Melbourne was a pacifist and asked himself: ‘What would I do if the Japanese invaded Australia? I was thinking of that all the time and I never came up with an answer. I don’t know what I would have done . . . if a Japanese came at me with a bayonet or a Samurai sword. I suppose I’d have tried to hit him with a cricket bat—or something like that.’

Hewett, however, an even feistier spirit than Brennan, would later say that delusions of racial purity influenced such fears and determinations, and that was true. But the record of atrocity in China and throughout Asia in the past few years gave anyone reasonable fear, even if we now know that Perth, Gulgong and Taree did not figure high amongst the objectives of the Imperial Japanese forces.

Laurie Aarons, widely travelled Communist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, was fortified in a resolve to fight as a guerrilla should the invasion eventuate, an impulse that many Australians of radical, liberal and conservative background shared. He and his friends established a cache of a few .22 calibre rifles and some food in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. ‘What we wanted to do was to have at least the possibility that should the Japanese invade . . . we’d have some stores, some weapons, to enable us to conduct a guerrilla war . . . what we called a People’s War . . . not just the armed forces, but also the people.’

When Japan had entered the war there were about 132 full-time officers and men running the part-time militia, and a further 35,000 AIF available in Australia, other than those in the Middle East. By February 1942 there were almost a quarter of a million militiamen, many of them ‘called up’ and thus not volunteers, on full-time duty—their mandate was to defend Australian territory, including New Guinea. By the end of March the total AIF troops available for fighting anywhere or in training reached over a hundred thousand. This two-tier system grew from the revulsion many Australians, including Curtin and his party, had for conscription for service outside Australia’s immediate defence. But it was a cause of sometimes more than merely jovial derision directed by the volunteer AIF (or, as its members would argue, the true army) at the militia, who were seen as a home guard, a billet for the timid, the too young, the too old. In pubs and on the street, for sport or from malice, AIF members might throw scorn on the militia as ‘chocolate soldiers’ or ‘chocos’, and civilians would come to use the same term without any necessary ill-will but simply to distinguish one group from another. Under the pressure of coming events, the distinction would grow less significant. Previously, too, the militiamen had been prevented from volunteering for the AIF, but this rule was overturned in the 1942 emergency to allow a militia unit to become AIF if 75 per cent of its membership wanted to. Ultimately, for reasons of the militia’s coming valour, and America’s insistence that the Australians should conscript for foreign service as the Americans had done, the militia would be committed to a larger sphere of the Pacific, though not to the northern hemisphere. The introduction of this limited conscription for overseas service in 1943 would create bitter divisions in Labor and, for Curtin, the contempt of many of his fellow anti-conscriptionists from World War I.

There had been faint omens of hope even in the phase between Malaya’s invasion and the bombing of Darwin. After Pearl Harbor, some ships carrying American aircraft originally intended for US general MacArthur’s use in the Philippines were diverted to Australia. The convoy had arrived in Brisbane on 22 December 1941 with some field artillery units and disassembled planes. Four more ships with artillery units arrived in January, but none of them carried infantry. So in February 1942, a few raw American artillery and pilots, and a quarter of a million untrained militia and thirty-five thousand half-trained and recently recruited AIF volunteers, swelling out to a further sixty-five thousand recruits, along with the token Australian naval and air forces then in Australia, were ill-equipped to hold Australia. None of this was adequate to soothe Curtin’s concern.

A few days after the fall of Singapore, at a war bond rally in Martin Place, Curtin called on his audience: ‘Australians! You are the sons and daughters of Britishers. You have come from England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland. There is, fused in you also, the best qualities of other races.’

He was near collapse as he uttered these words, and afterwards was immediately driven to St Vincent’s Hospital with his daughter, Elsie the younger, at his side, and treated for severe gastritis. This was yet another instance of his vulnerability under the pressure of the war. He had just established an Allied Works Council to coordinate war production, and had appointed Ted Theodore, the hard-headed Queenslander, its chief, hoping for good things from him. In Curtin’s mind, there was no guarantee Theodore would be given the time he needed before the Japanese destroyed all, but at least Theodore was a friend, tolerant of Curtin’s conviction that, like other wartime leaders, he must suspend due process to allow for the summary internment of aliens and internal dissenters, and to impose press censorship. Only a few on the left wing of the party complained of this. One of them was the elderly but still idealistic Melbourne lawyer Maurice Blackburn, considered by Curtin a noble citizen as well as a long-time friend and fellow campaigner. To the scholarly Blackburn, there was no emergency on earth that justified the suspension of civil rights. No one would have felt the pain of these rifts between a number of friends of many decades, including Blackburn, more acutely than Curtin. Blackburn was like a father to him, and the father was condemning of the son, and would continue to be so in 1943, when Curtin amended the conscription laws.

Meanwhile, anxiety for the safety of the troops returning from the Middle East, their survival in seas that were now dominated by the Japanese—for at this stage of the war the Japanese had penetrated the Indian Ocean as well as the Pacific—devoured Curtin. At that moment, his wife Elsie observed, Curtin harboured the sincere fear that he would be captured by the Japanese when they invaded and that he would be ‘crucified’.

Curtin is credited with seeking to return veteran divisions to Australia. In fact it was Churchill who first suggested, at the end of December 1941, that a division of Australian troops from the Middle East might be moved back to Asia to face the rampant Japanese. But Curtin did not want a division going to India or Burma, as Churchill desired, though it is likely that had an Australian division arrived in time from the Middle East, Curtin would have agreed to let it reinforce Singapore. Churchill remained determined that at least one of the Australian divisions should be sent off to Burma. In trying to persuade Curtin to commit a division to the Burmese capital, Rangoon, Churchill talked Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Earle Page into helping him, and also recruited Roosevelt. Churchill reminded Curtin that he owed him a favour, that Churchill had allowed a British division to reinforce Singapore rather than go to Burma, and that that division had now been gobbled up. If Curtin refused his request, said Churchill, ‘a very grave effect will be produced upon the President and the Washington Circle, on which you are so largely dependent’.

But the fall of Singapore had brought out the steel in Curtin’s soul. Churchill had urged the Greek campaign with similar eloquence, and it had been a disaster. He had spouted the benefit of Singapore, and it had served as a mere appetiser to Japanese intentions.

Curtin suspected, but could not yet be sure, that the British and Americans had made a secret commitment by which the Pacific theatre would be the poor relative of the European. In fact, the meeting at which this undisclosed agreement was forged in Washington was known as the Arcadia Conference on 14 January 1942, Arcadia being a code name. The agreement they came to bore the title WWI. It was never announced, but nonetheless Curtin planned to send the Foreign minister and lawyer Herbert Vere Evatt to Washington and London to argue the case for the Americans and British to support Australia in its need.

Before Evatt left, Curtin made a broadcast to the United States on 14 March. If the Japanese invaded, he said, ‘there will still be Australians fighting on Australian soil until the turning point be reached, and we will advance over blackened ruins, through blasted and fire-swept cities, across scorched plains, until we drive the enemy into the sea’. He was, above all (and in spite of the warning he had received that if the Japanese landed in south-eastern Australia, many business leaders were preparing to cooperate with the invaders), trying to sedate any American suspicion that Australia would make a separate peace with Japan the way France had with Germany. In the struggle to defend themselves, he said, Australians recognised that America was now their leader. ‘If Australia goes, the Americas are wide open,’ he warned his American audience.

Meanwhile, setting off on his mission, Evatt was accompanied by his wife Mary Alice and the amiable businessman William Sydney Robinson, who were less nervous flyers than Evatt was when it came to crossing the contested Pacific. Evatt had to travel by naval aircraft, and he was a terrified flyer. Jack Beasley, the old Lang Labor man who had returned to the Labor fold, would write, ‘If medals of bravery were being given out, poor bloody Evatt would have as many as a dray horse’s harness. He’d be crawling aboard those little planes at night, without lights, no heating, freezing to death, the stink of petrol everywhere, and sit for hours in a roar that would knock your ears off, with the plane trembling all round him.’ And had not many of Menzies’ most talented ministers been killed in an air crash in Canberra?

Evatt’s weeks in Washington would be rendered partly futile by the existence of the secret WWI agreement, but as a result of his representations the Americans formed a Pacific War Council to keep him and Australia happy. During Evatt’s visit he made the mistake of encouraging Richard Casey, Australia’s experienced representative in Washington, to take up the job of British representative in the Middle East, with British Cabinet status. He did so because he believed Casey was one of those who favoured the Empire first and so was little use in Washington. As well, he reasoned, now that General MacArthur had fetched up one morning in Australia, Australia’s needs would be adequately supplied by America. He did a good job of quieting any fears that Australia would make a separate peace with Japan.

In letting Casey go, Evatt, given his American-born wife, might have wanted the Washington position for himself. In any case, Casey’s new appointment to the Middle East was announced by the British government on the BBC on 19 March, without Evatt or anyone else first letting Curtin know. Curtin and Churchill sent acid cables to each other. The cables were put forward by Churchill to convince the British War Cabinet that Curtin was ‘behaving deplorably’ and giving in to ‘a childish fit of temper’. Since the Americans were fed the same version, Evatt’s mission in Washington, during which he pleaded that the United States send to Australia six weeks’ worth of Britain’s allocation from the United States’ war production of aircraft, tanks, guns and other material, was undermined. This largesse, he argued to the Americans, would actually re-establish the position of the British government in the Australian mind implicitly damaged by Singapore to full flower and reignite affection for the old country.

It was not until London in May 1942 that Evatt found out about the strategic priority given to defeating the Nazi regime. His tendency would have been to accuse Churchill and his War Cabinet of treachery, but his reaction was tempered by the sage Robinson’s advice. Churchill believed, unlike Evatt, that a full-scale invasion of Australia by the Japanese was very unlikely. Evatt settled down to get what he could, including three Spitfire squadrons, though the crisis of a further Rommel advance in the Middle East delayed them. Evatt was also demanding the return of the 9th Division, and that Britain should give consent to the proposal he had already put to the Americans, that a part of American war production normally sent to Britain should go to Australia. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was worried not about the safety of Australia but about the rift in the relationship between the British and the Australians, and he had no sympathy for Evatt’s attempt to get for Australia those six weeks of allocation from America.

Altogether, Evatt’s mission was not a success. In Churchill’s mind, Australia’s loss could be tolerated better than more strategic losses in Burma and India. What had changed everything, though, was the arrival of the defeated but grandiose American general MacArthur at the Pacific’s last-chance saloon, Australia.