WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 (UPI) -- Australians commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a reminder of the time their vast, under-populated nation faced the threat of conquest by the Empire of Japan.
It was a much greater threat than most people -- including Australians themselves -- realize today.
The true trauma for Australia did not come, as it did for Americans, when the war began on Dec. 7, 1941. It came two months later on Feb. 15, 1942 when the British imperial military fortress in the Far East, Singapore, fell to the great Japanese commander Gen. Tomoyuki "Tiger" Yamashita.
Among the 135,000 British imperial troops who went into captivity were 15,000 Australians. Even worse, the great British military shield that had guarded Australia since its first settlement more than 150 years before had now vanished. Australia was wide open for conquest and her own best, battle-hardened soldiers were half a world away, fighting, as they had in World War I, to defend Britain's interests in the Middle East. Only 7,000 trained Australian troops remained at home to guard a continent the size of the United States. More than twice as many had just been forced to surrender at Singapore.
As the amazing Japanese tide of conquest swept away the British, French, and Dutch colonial empires and all American power in East Asia, defenseless, under-populated Australia was wide open for conquest and the military strategists in Tokyo knew it.
So did Yamashita, the greatest general in modern Japanese history. After the fall of the Dutch East Indies, as modern Indonesia was then called, to a brilliant Japanese combined army-navy campaign, he proposed to strike while the iron was hot and forge ahead within weeks to land a small force of a single division on Australia's almost unpopulated and totally undefended northern coast. And Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the tactical genius who had devised and planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, agreed with him.
Had Yamashita and Yamamoto been given the go-ahead, the whole course of world history and of the World War II would have been changed. As historian David Bergamini comments in his 1971 history, "Japan's Imperial Conspiracy":
"Despite the vastness of Australian distances (Yamashita) felt that it would be feasible to land a division almost immediately at Darwin and thrust hard and fast down the north-south railroad and road links towards Adelaide and Melbourne on the south coast. ... Tough as they might be, not even Australian civilians, he felt, would be any match for disciplined troops. Moreover, he thought that the clean, hygiene conscious Japanese soldier would perform far better in the antiseptic wastes of Australia than in the septic jungles of Burma and New Guinea."
There is, as the great playwright William Shakespeare wrote "a tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune," and Yamashita knew it. But his staid, more cautious -- and jealous -- superiors in Tokyo did not. They liked the idea of conquering or at least isolating Australia, but wanted to do it in a more "thorough" and cautious manner. Instead, their caution led them to disaster.
The war planners on Tokyo decided that the "methodical" and "sensible" way to proceed would be to take the city of Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea first as an advance base from which to move against Australia. But U.S. intelligence had cracked key Japanese military codes and learned of the plan. There would have been no spare troops weeks before to stop Yamashita landing in Northern Australia, but two U.S. aircraft carriers, the Lexington and the Yorktown, could be spared to block the Japanese move to invade Port Moresby by sea. And on May 7-8, they did so, at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Australia was yet not saved. But it had been given a precious breathing space.
The nation's new Prime Minister, John Curtin, made the most of it. He is utterly unknown outside his own country, yet he was the savior of a continent. A conscientious objector who refused to serve in the Australian Army during World War I, he ironically found himself his nation's war leader as head of its Labour Party in World War II. And he proved to be an outstandingly good one.
Curtin's predecessor, blowhard Robert Menzies, spend long months away from his country in London dreaming of replacing Winston Churchill himself as Britain's war leader. He stripped Australia's defenses by sending her best troops to be sacrificed by incompetent generals at Singapore or to chase German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel up and down the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya.
Curtin, by contrast, defied Churchill's ire by pulling the key Australian divisions out of the Eighth Army in the Western Desert and bringing them home. Churchill, who could nurse ferocious grudges, never forgave him. But Curtin's decisive move and strength of character saved his country. Once the Australian divisions were brought home, Curtin immediately rushed them to New Guinea where they were joined by fledging American forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur. They were just in time. Japan had launched a second attempt to take Port Moresby, the key to Australia, by sending 14,000 men on foot over land across the 13,000-foot high Owen Stanley Mountains. The Australians stopped them only 20 miles short of Port Moresby.
It was one of the most bizarre and difficult campaigns in military history. Commented the great historian William Manchester, "(The troops) called themselves 'swamp rats'. The hideous tropical ulcers that formed on their feet, arms, bellies, chests and armpits were known as 'jungle rot.' Waving away the clouds of flies and mosquitoes that swarmed over mess gear was called 'the New Guinea salute.'... Brilliantly colored, enormous insects would land on a sleeping man and, like vampires, suck his body fluids."
Australia was rescued from the threat of invasion in 1942 by U.S. global sea power as well as the bravery of her own soldiers. Sixty-years later Australia was one of the very first nation's to offer the United States the use of their troops after the devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Australian's remember their gratitude to the American people from the crisis of 1942 and the bonds of alliance established so long ago remain strong.
