Know Thy Enemy & Thyself: Understanding the Gravity of our Japanese Threat
The wording might have changed a little since Chinese general Sun Tzu brushed ‘The Art of War’ in circa sixth century BC, but the meaning today is clear enough:
Know thy enemy and know thyself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know thyself but not thy enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not thyself, wallow in defeat every time.1
If you argue that an enemy never harboured desires for your soil, one would think that, had you the opportunity, you would go to the sources of the former enemy to verify your contention. Regrettably some of our historians have not, nor indeed spent time in Japan engaging in research. In reality, many Australians even today know precious little of the behind-the-scenes motivations and machinations of our former enemy and the thinking of that country’s militaristic leaders towards us, especially in those heady and crucial days of early 1942, when Japan seemed unstoppable and Australia’s future was being actively debated.
That Australians promulgate and accept the theory that an invasion threat was minute or even that it did not exist, and thus a Battle for Australia commemoration has no validity, might well demonstrate that on Sun Tzu’s score, apart from our lack of knowledge about Japan’s intentions, we also know little of ourselves. Sun Tzu might wince at the consequences for a nation wallowing in such ignorance. If our wartime history is to be reflected accurately, today’s Australians need to study the mind and motivation of the former enemy just as thoroughly as did the Australian generals in the war of 1941–45.
How different things are today in our relationship with Japan; with our close economic ties, Australia now has a strategic defence partnership with Japan based on high ideals, including democratic values, a commitment to human rights, freedom and the rule of law, and attributes such as mutual respect, trust and deep friendship, to quote the bilateral agreement.
In the defence partnership signed in March 2007 by the previous prime ministers of both countries and reinforced by the new governments of Japan and Australia, the two nations agree to ‘deepen and expand’ bilateral cooperation in the areas of security and defence cooperation. This includes cooperation on counterterrorism and seeks, for instance, a peaceful resolution of issues related to North Korea. But as Australia’s Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, points out, the agreement ‘is not a treaty and does not create a mutual expectation of military support in times of strategic challenge or crisis’. Nevertheless, the Australia Defence Forum is working to deepen practical cooperation with the Japan Self Defense Force in areas including unit-to-unit exchanges and combined exercising and training, according to the minister.2
While the defence of the two nations moves forward in positive, albeit cautious and limited collaboration, it is ironic that important aspects of our knowledge about the intentions of the former enemy between 1941 and 1945 and their full impact are blurred and misunderstood today. More alarmingly, this lack of reliable knowledge from our wartime past by those who should know better and the expression of questionable theories designed to fit snugly into a modern-day academic hypothesis, such as Australians today being indoctrinated by wartime and pre-war propaganda, means that our future generations are being taught inaccurate and subjective history.
This lack of knowledge is preventable and unnecessary, for there is abundant and compelling evidence on the gravity of Japan’s threat to Australia in 1942 and related subjects available for any researcher’s seeking, especially in Japan. Primary evidence includes Japan’s official war history series, Senshi Sosho, in its 102 volumes from the National Institute of Defense Studies (NIDS) in Tokyo, which is the main policy research arm of the Ministry of Defense. (The Australian War Memorial has translated one segment of one volume of Senshi Sosho in relation to Australia. The complete 102 volumes in Japanese sit on the shelves of the National Library of Australia in Canberra.)
Primary evidence on the Japanese threat also is available in Japan and elsewhere in recorded interviews and interrogations of surviving Imperial Army and Imperial Navy officers, in their memoirs, diaries and books, and in the minutes of meetings actually discussing the invasion of Australia. One of Senshi Sosho’s senior contributors was Sadatoshi Tomioka, the former captain and later rear admiral, who as a war planner in the Imperial Navy’s General Staff, was one of the leading advocates of an invasion of Australia in 1942.
Tomioka also wrote on the Australia issue in his Kaisen to shusen: Hito to kiko to keikaku (The opening and closing of the Pacific war: the people, the mechanisms and the planning):
The enemy had to be beaten and victory won. In order to win, the enemy had to be denied the use of Australia as a base, no matter what. As long as the enemy had no foothold there, Australia could be taken.
But if within the next two years the United States concentrated rapidly on aircraft production and made full use of Australia, Japan would never be able to resist the material onslaught which would follow.3
Western countries, including the United States, have valuable resources on the subject too. Many interviews with Tomioka are available through the Papers of Gordon W Prange at the University of Maryland Libraries and other material is in the Prange Collection at the University of Pittsburgh.
The editorial in the Australian Army Journal, Winter 2007, correctly predicted that the oration/essay by Dr Peter Stanley, ‘Was there a Battle for Australia?’ would be controversial. Stanley’s submission was a republication of the Australian War Memorial’s Anniversary oration, delivered on the eve of Remembrance Day before an invited audience on 10 November 2006. Putting aside the appropriateness or otherwise of using a Remembrance Day eve oration to attack one’s critics, it should be noted that at the time of his address Stanley was the principal historian of the Australian War Memorial (AWM), a public employer which allowed him, to quote the AWM, ‘the intellectual freedom to research and publish his views, as you would expect by virtue of his position then at the Memorial’.4
His words were controversial not so much because they challenged the contentious idea of combining various battles or campaigns into one composite ‘Battle for Australia’, and commemorating it on a set day, but more so because they promoted what Stanley described in his work as his ‘internationalist’ stance on Australia’s involvement in the Second World War. This is a contentious stance which since May 2002 has challenged thoughts about the very basis of Japan’s aims and motives in the war as that nation looked southward to the Australian continent.
Stanley argues in the Army Journal that proponents of the ‘Battle for Australia’ want to believe that Australia was under threat and it is this need that drives them to build an emotional saga around the Japanese menace and how Australian Servicemen prevented the cataclysm:
Those who advance this idea argue that from the outbreak of war with Japan Australia was the objective of the Japanese advance, and that 1942 saw a series of crucial campaigns that resulted in the defeat of this thrust. In some versions of the battle it is seen as continuing up to the Japanese surrender.
The point of the Pacific war, they imply, was that Australia was in danger of attack or conquest, and that the significance of the campaigns in the south-west Pacific was that they prevented such a calamity.5
Stanley and other like-minded ‘internationalists’ have long preferred to see Australia’s Second World War contribution in the context of a global war, and ‘an international coalition against inter-continental enemies’ in an alliance in which Australia played as much a part as any and any other view is parochial. This idea was expounded rather forcefully by Stanley in the Griffith Review in 2005 when he wrote:
Why is it that stories of attack, invasion and incursion are so persistent? It seems to me that Australians want to believe that they were part of a war, that the war came close; that it mattered. Why can’t we as a nation accept that the war the Allies fought was decided far from Australia—in North Africa, north-west Europe and above all on the steppes of European Russia?
Why do we appear to want to believe that Australia really was threatened with invasion, that it was attacked; even that Japanese commandoes really did want to land on its shores? Set against the prosaic reality, the desire is poignant and rather pathetic.
He castigated with a broad brush those who might differ:
In the eyes of nationalist historians, such as David Day, and popular writers who follow them, such as journalists Paul Ham and Peter FitzSimons, Australia faced an actual threat of invasion, a danger dispelled by a combination of a resolute Curtin in Canberra and heroic diggers in Papua.6
Even more colourful epitaphs, including ‘revisionist veterans’ and ‘nationalist partisans’ have been employed. Stanley sees the Battle for Australia movement and its supporters as an example of public emotionalism and nationalism, as he stated in the Australian Army Journal: ‘It promotes relatively unimportant events close to Australia over important events far away, purely on rather simplistic calculus of proximity. It has become the new orthodoxy in Australian military history.’7
This is where feathers can become ruffled. Tell any old Digger, who fought for instance at Kokoda or Milne Bay, that their campaign was a ‘relatively unimportant event’ and watch the reaction. Having the author of such words bearing the title of the principal historian of the Australian War Memorial, as they have, and the words become even more acerbic.
Stanley has documented the sometimes vehement criticism he gets to some of his published views, including hate mail, some from Australians including ex-Servicemen or their families: ‘Some challenged my citizenship and patriotism. I was sorry to receive letters accusing me of denigrating the service and sacrifice of those who fought.’ But Stanley points out, as he did in his oration and in the Australian Army Journal, that he is ‘determined that the sacrifices and the achievements’ of the Second World War, and especially those of Australia, should never be forgotten.8
From 2002 onwards, there have been four pillars to this ‘internationalist’ philosophy expounded by Stanley and a number of his supporting academics. These four pillars, as I call them, form the foundation for opposition to the concept of the Battle for Australia. As we shall see, the pillars over recent years began a seismic shift and at least one has all but collapsed. But essentially the tone of the debate has been: ‘If there was never a threat of invasion, how could there have been a Battle for Australia.’ Bob Reece, professor in history, Murdoch University, has encapsulated this theory:
In short, the [Imperial] navy did have an invasion plan, but it was rejected at the top command level.
The popular perception in Australia in early 1942 that an invasion was imminent served to end what had been widespread apathy towards the war and allowed General Douglas MacArthur (a consummate politician) to big-note himself. To enshrine this mistaken and manipulated perception in a Battle for Australia commemoration is to deny history and usher in a new kind of unthinking, populist nationalism.9
The changing words to outline the theory have been expressed in a variety of hues. ‘No historian of standing believes the Japanese had a plan to invade Australia, there is not a skerrick of evidence’, Stanley lectured The Australian newspaper’s Higher Education section in an interview.10
The four pillars to this academic hypothesis can thus be summarised:
- Australia did not face an invasion threat from Japan.
- Discussion of an invasion of Australia in Japan was an activity, quickly dismissed, by a few middle-ranking naval officers.
- Australia’s defences in 1942 were not weak.
- Australia’s wartime leader John Curtin, in an effort to motivate the Australian public’s war effort, resorted to lies about the threat of invasion and his deception skewed Australian thinking on the matter.
Stanley first delivered a controversial paper, ‘He’s coming south (not): the invasion that wasn’t’ when addressing the Australian War Memorial’s ‘Remembering 1942’ history conference on 31 May 2002. The media took to the comments with gusto. The Age the following day headlined the story ‘Japanese invasion a myth: historian’ and journalist Mark Forbes ventured that ‘... somebody forgot to tell the Japanese’ about the invasion of Australia.
Pillar 1. No Invasion Threat From Japan
At the ‘Remembering 2002’ conference Stanley said it was common for Australians to assume that the invasion threat was real:
So the popular perception is that Japan planned to invade Australia, would have had not the battle for Papua been won, and that the man responsible was the great war leader John Curtin. This paper takes issue with that perception.
He declared that there was no invasion danger:
An actual danger of invasion had never existed and the likelihood diminished through 1942 as Allied victories eroded Japan’s offensive capability.11
Few who have studied the subject would argue that orders for the invasion of Australia were ever issued. Simply, they were not. However, there is strong evidence to indicate that in the first three months of 1942, when Japan went from victory to victory, proposals to invade Australia were very actively considered by the Imperial Navy at a senior level. Indeed there were a variety of serious proposals coming from different naval sources. Both the Combined Fleet at Hashirajima and Naval General Staff in Tokyo had their invasion plans, which at the very least can be described as a real and significant threat. Further, an influential navy, which had the Pearl Harbor success under its belt, repeatedly and frequently pressured the Imperial Army, sometimes in heated debate, to become involved in its schemes for the invasion of Australia and in its early stages even had some army support.
Some of the Imperial Navy officers who supported or proposed the invasion of Australia at some stage in 1942 include: the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto; his chief of staff, Admiral Matome Ugaki; the commander-in-chief of Japan’s second fleet who led the southern invasion operations including the invasion of Malaya, Admiral Nobutake Kondo; the commander of the Japanese fourth fleet, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue; the commander of the second carrier division, Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi; the head of the bureau of naval affairs within Naval General Staff, Admiral Takasumi Oka; and many powerful naval war planners, including the aforementioned chief of the operations section of Naval General Staff, Baron Captain (later Rear Admiral) Sadatoshi Tomioka.
Yamamoto told Ugaki, according to the Japanese war history series Senshi Sosho, that he had three targets in mind: India, Australia and Hawaii.12 Of the three Yamamoto counted Hawaii as the most important, because of the strategic threat the Pacific base and its as yet untouched carrier fleet. Australia was included in Yamamoto’s initial invasion plans, according to John J Stephan, because the commander-in-chief wanted a bold strategy which he called ‘happo yabure’, or ‘strike on all sides’.13
After much study Ugaki, in late January and early February, came down in favour of capturing Australia’s north, among other landings. Ugaki’s operational planners in Combined Fleet embraced invading northern Australia, along with other strategic points. They submitted to Navy General Staff a list of priorities which included the comment: ‘Port Darwin must be taken’.14
Naval General Staff soon agreed with Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet. Admiral Nobutake Kondo, commander of the attack force on Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, was a former chief of staff of the Combined Fleet. He prepared a proposal for Yamamoto. Kondo saw Japan as having two planning options: one was an operation to take India and the other, an operation to capture Australia: ‘The Australia operation ... could be regarded as part of our main operation against America and also would have a rich chance of taking hold of American task forces’.15
Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, a moderate, and his staff officers aboard the cruiser Kashima, called for Japanese expansion in the Solomon Islands–New Guinea area, as the necessary first steps required for landings on the Australian mainland. Historian Hedley Willmott recorded Admiral Inoue’s support for the invasion plans of Baron Sadatoshi Tomioka: ‘Inoue would dearly have loved it if Japan secured the eastern seaboard of Australia, since that would have removed the most serious threats to his position.’16
Another admiral’s plan came to light during table manoeuvres aboard Yamamoto’s flagship, the Yamato, anchored on the Inland Sea. It came from a close confidant of Yamamoto, Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi. Between 20–23 February Yamaguchi distributed copies of a blueprint invasion plan proposing widespread invasions across the Indian and Pacific oceans starting from May 1942. There would be an invasion of Ceylon in May. During June and July 1942 landings would be made on Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia, New Zealand and northern Australia.
But Yamamoto now was becoming interested in a new plan to take the atolls of Midway to draw out the US Pacific fleet for a decisive battle. Midway would be a precursor to an invasion of Hawaii and, if successful, would have meant follow-up invasions of Australia, New Zealand and adjacent islands.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who had captured Singapore, was imprisoned near Manila awaiting trial as a war criminal in 1945, when he spoke of his wartime plans for invading Australia. It was practically identical to his successful campaign in Malaya, according to author John Deane Potter who interviewed him. Yamashita said he intended to land on each side of the major Australian cities and cut them off, first making a series of dummy landings to draw off the ‘pitifully few’ Australian troops:
With even Sydney and Brisbane in my hands, it would have been comparatively simple to subdue Australia. I would never visualise occupying it entirely. It was too large. With its coastline, anyone can always land there exactly as he wants.17
Major General Akira Muto, the chief of the military affairs bureau of the Army ministry, seemed to be out of step with many of his army colleagues when he agreed that decisive action was necessary: ‘National defense spheres ought to be clearly decided; once that is done, Australia and India ought to be strategic spheres; and we should make a move when necessary’18
David Horner, professor of Australian defence history, addressed the ‘Remembering 1942’ conference in 2002 organised by the Australian War Memorial. But his remarks, seemingly then at divergence with the more controversial comments of Stanley, received little media attention. He said that without help from the United States, Australia could have done little to prevent an invasion in those first few months of 1942:
Australia’s political and military leaders were fully justified in believing that the country was under a real threat of invasion. But, unknown to the Australians, Japanese Army and Navy leaders were deep in argument about whether to invade Australia.19
Horner’s statement about the gravity of the invasion threat is just one from a bevy of eminent historians, both Japanese and Western, who acknowledge that Australia was seriously threatened. Official Australian war historian Gavin Long in The Six Years War, published in part by the Australian War Memorial, wrote:
And soon naval leaders were advocating two more ambitious ventures: invasion of Australia and a thrust towards Hawaii. Conquest of Australia would deprive America of a well-equipped base from which to mount a counter-offensive. The army staff maintained that the Australians would bitterly resist attack on their vast country, twice the size of China, and the invasion would demand ten more divisions and 1,500,000 tons of shipping.20
Stanley has spoken of his reliance on the works of British historian Hedley Willmott. Writing online in 2008 about his Japanese research, Stanley said:
I don’t pretend that my Special Subject is ‘Impractical proposals to invade Australia made by Japanese admirals early in 1942’. I’ve relied on the more expert work of historians such as Hedley Willmott and Henry Frei, and on the advice of various colleagues all more knowledgeable about imperial Japan than me. But you don’t have to read more impractical proposals to see the way events occurred.21
So let us firstly look at what Hedley Willmott wrote in The Barrier and the Javelin to which Stanley has referred. Willmott said:
In studying the Australia operation the Japanese had to consider the occupation of either northern Australia or the whole continent. Both courses strongly recommended themselves to the Plans Division of the Naval General Staff. The Australia option was in many ways the brainchild of the division’s commanding officer, Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka ... His was one of the finest brains in the Imperial Navy, and his idea of an attack on Australia was not as incredible as it might first appear. Both in terms of inhabited area and population the country was (and is) extremely small. Tomioka’s designs on Australia enjoyed support from [Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi] Inoue, commander of the fourth fleet, and from his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Shikazo Yano.22
Willmott records that between January and early April 1942, the Japanese High Command faced a delicate and awkward time in deciding what to do next, but opposition from the Imperial Army killed off the navy’s invasion of Australia plan. But Willmott notes that the plan was not killed off quickly or entirely. He records that an invasion of Australia was even resurrected by the navy in July 1942, surprisingly after the Coral Sea and Midway battles. Willmott accurately records the determination of Naval General Staff, in particular, to demand an Australian invasion. The reader might be surprised at a navy that could still think about an invasion of Australia after those two epic battles; but that is a logical thought about a totally illogical navy.
Stanley on 3 September 2008 likewise named Henri Frei as one of the experts on whom he has relied concerning Australia. Frei, a Swiss scholar, was one of the first to write at length on the invasion issue, relying strongly on Japanese documentation, especially the war history Senshi Sosho. Frei’s work, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia, is encapsulated by Stanley in his recent book:
Henry Frei summarised the debate, noting, ‘about the only thing all three [sic] services could agree to with regard to Australia was the destruction of Darwin—ironically, because it had nothing to do with an invasion’.
Stanley then quotes Frei as writing that by early March 1942, the Japanese had produced an ill-fitting compromise:
Invasion of Australia—and then only a ‘temporary invasion of Port Darwin’—was relegated to a ‘future option’. As Henry Frei wrote, ‘in reality, this meant little more than ‘never’.23
In fact, it meant ‘never’ for the army, but certainly not the navy. The chances of an Australian invasion by the end of March 1942 indeed were rapidly diminishing. In relation to Australia and India, the army allowed inclusion in the text of a proposal on 13 March 1942 to Emperor Hirohito of a ‘temporary invasion of Darwin’ as ‘a future option to demonstrate positive warfare’ It was a significant concession, even if it implied the possibility of a very limited assault on a small part of Australia. Bitter debate had taken place about Australia between the two services. The navy eventually appeared to accept the army’s reasoning, but in reality the navy merely deferred its desire to invade Australia. As the head of the operations section of the Army Department, Colonel Takushiro Hattori noted in one of his memoirs: ‘... the Navy did not abandon its stand in subsequent war guidance, and attempted to maintain the offensives in its war operations’.24
The army’s chief of staff General Hajime Sugiyama, who took minutes of planning meetings in March 1942, summarised the arguments:
Put simply, the Navy argued for an aggressive offensive that included attacking Australia, whereas the Army outright opposed attacking Australia, stating that the focus ought to be on firmly establishing the situation so that Japan will be unbeatable in the long-term.25
General Sugiyama when referring to ‘attacking Australia’ was in fact speaking about invasion because at the time of writing, Darwin was already being bombed from the air.
In his book Invading Australia, Stanley contends: Again, it is important for Australians not to imagine that imperial Headquarters argued for weeks just over Australia’s fate.’ Certainly, the record shows that other options also were being debated. But it is ill-advised to dismiss lightly the level, strength and length of the debate on Australia and the Imperial Navy’s determination to see the invasion happen. To suggest that at this time Australia was not seriously threatened is to deny the factual evidence.
Henry Frei rightly concludes that Imperial Army opposition was such as to effectively block the navy’s proposals to invade Australia. But he did not under-estimate the gravity of the threat. The northern Australian coast with its submarine and air bases was viewed as a strategic liability that could involve Japan in a war of exhaustion. Thus, Frei wrote, the Navy General Staff sought as early as early December to press for control over all of Australia as a major ‘stage two’ war objective:
This would be achieved by invading the strategically most important points on the northern and north eastern coasts of Australia. Japan would there annihilate the enemy’s maritime forces, cut the American-Australian line of communication, and thereby deal the entire Australian nation a thorough blow.
The Navy General Staff reckoned that this could be done with very little expenditure of men and war material. After all, Australia had only a small population and its bases on the north coast were isolated outposts facing the sea, with desert up to their backdoors.
At the same time denying the United States access to Australian bases was not the only objective. Isolating the vast continent from the British Commonwealth would also hasten Britain’s downfall.26
Thus Frei, like Willmott, can hardly be quoted as a historian who dismissed a Japanese invasion threat.
Hiromi Tanaka is a professor of history at the National Defense Academy at Yokosuka, Tokyo Bay. The academy trains young men and women to become officers of the Self-Defense Forces. When I spoke with him in August 2007, Professor Tanaka had not a shadow of doubt about the gravity of the threat to Australia:
... there were so many high ranking officers, including those in the Navy General Staff, who were arguing about attacking Australia. Also in the Combined Fleet. Arguing about attacking and invading Australia. It wasn’t just the initiative of junior officers involved in this talk.
It was official conversation because the Navy officially submitted it to the Army. The Navy military orders [planning] section officers visited the Army strategic section. They were always visiting the Army pushing this point of view between February and March 1942 about invading Australia.
Professor Tanaka, a fellow of the Japan–Australia Research Project at the Australian War Memorial, emphasised the illogicality of the Imperial Navy at a time when traditional naval thinking and strategies had been all but abandoned:
You must understand that the Imperial Japanese Navy was such an irresponsible organisation; they never wanted to take responsibility. Coming to Australia and occupying one small beach was considered a Navy responsibility, but after the takeover, they would have withdrawn, and left the rest to the Army, saying the rest was an Army responsibility ...
Their attitude was, we would land the troops to take part in the invasion of Australia and then they would leave it all to the Army to do all the work. The reason they could think about this invasion was that they didn’t have to think realistically.27
There are numerous references in Senshi Sosho to the proposed invasion of Australia, including this summary in one volume:
The navy’s argument was that establishing a defensive posture was disadvantage to the execution of long-term strategies ... The reasons for the army’s opposition to this policy were that the invasion of Australia was expected to require 12 army divisions, in addition to transport shipping requirements. Reflecting on the bitter experience of the China Incident, the chances were high that an invasion would extend over the whole of the Australia content.28
Prime Minister Hideki Tojo is often quoted, in his last days, as saying Japan had no intention of invading Australia. Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, an uncle to Empress Nagako, was commander of Defense Command and a member of the Supreme War Council.
In his diary, Higashikuni said he told Tojo after the initial successes that he should start peace overtures with Britain and the United States. According to Higashikuni, Tojo was defiant, replying: ‘I think we will have few problems occupying not only Java and Sumatra but also Australia if things go on like this. We shouldn’t think about peace at this time.’29
Turning to the remaining three pillars of Stanley’s hypothesis:
Pillar 2. Invasion of Australia: A Few Middle-Ranking Officers
In his address at ‘Remembering 1942’, Stanley dismissed a Japanese invasion of Australia with the words:
In the euphoria of victory early in 1942 some visionary middle-ranking naval staff officers in Tokyo proposed that Japan should go further. In February and March they proposed that Australia should be invaded ... The plans got no further than some acrimonious discussions.30
As we have seen, the proponents were neither restricted to middle-rankers nor naval staff officers in Tokyo. They included influential admirals, including those in Combined Fleet, and some generals. Stanley was following a flawed line expounded by the ‘magisterial’ Frei, who simply got it wrong, about the middle-rankers. Stanley, in his 2008 book, has dropped the dismissive ‘middle-ranking’ tag.31
Pillar 3. Australia's Defences Were Not Weak In 1942
As part of the process of downplaying the threat of invasion, while subscribing to Churchill’s view that Curtin had been ‘panicky’ about invasion, Stanley has maintained that Australia in 1942 could have defended herself:
There is an exaggerated perception these days that Australia’s defences were ‘weak’: Australia stood utterly defenceless’, writes Brian McKinley. But even before the valorising of Kokoda began, the official historians thought the value of the Militia had been ‘written down’.32
The contention that Australia was not weak in 1942, especially at the outbreak of war, is unsustainable. Willmott is among dozens of experts who differ with Stanley: ‘Both dominions [Australia and New Zealand] were desperately weak, as their attempts to reinforce their various garrisons and islands showed only too well.’33
Stanley contends that Australia’s Army commander-in chief, General Thomas Blamey, ‘remained confident’ of holding the Japanese. In fact, Blamey later wrote:
Had the Japanese wished to seize it, Western Australia, with its vast potential wealth, might have fallen an easy prey to them in 1942. While it would have extended their commitment to a tremendous degree, it would have given them great advantages. At that time it could probably have been captured and controlled by a force no greater than that used to capture Malaya.34
The cream of Australia’s armed forces was overseas in the first months of the war. Prime Minister John Curtin, on a trip home to Perth, was appalled to be told that troops were drilling with broomsticks, as he wrote to Army minister Frank Forde: ‘In other words it was contended that a large proportion of the troops would not possess a weapon with which to fight or defend themselves.’
Forde responded that there was a national shortage of 18,000 rifles, but reconditioned First World War rifles would soon be available.35
Pillar 4. Curtin Deceived Australia about the Japanese Threat
Stanley began his criticism of wartime Prime Minister John Curtin at the ‘Remembering 1942’ history conference in 2002. The criticism lasted until 2008, when it underwent a sea change. Stanley initially spoke of Curtin lying to the public:
... Curtin did not save Australia from any real threat. Instead, one of the lasting legacies of his whipping up of the fear of invasion has been a persistent heritage of bogus invasion stories.
He also spoke of Curtin’s alleged deception:
I’m arguing that there was in fact no invasion plan, that the Curtin Government exaggerated the threat, and that the enduring consequences of the reality of its deception was to skew our understanding of the reality of the invasion crisis of 1942.
Stanley at the same time castigated Australian historians who since the war had ‘misunderstood the crisis’ and/or ‘accepted Curtin’s exaggerations’.36
Indeed, it was Stanley, by his own frank admission, who got it wrong. In September 2008, Stanley ended this particular line of criticism of Curtin’s ‘bogus stories’ and ‘deception’ while speaking on ABC Radio:
I am at a disagreement with myself. In 2002 I was arguing that Curtin was motivating the people by gingering them up about a possibility that there was an invasion and that that was quite a deliberate manipulation. And I have to say that I have changed my mind on that.
In the research for this book over the last couple of years, I gained a deeper appreciation and a greater respect for John Curtin. And I now believe that he was absolutely sincere. Deluded perhaps, but sincere and he wasn’t manipulating at all.37
To borrow and twist an American nautical quote: Scratch one pillar!
Now that Australia and Japan are on perhaps the best defence terms since the end of the war, it would be timely if a major effort is made by Australia to devote resources to a thorough and detailed study of the extent and nature of the Japanese menace to Australia, especially in that key period of 1942. During four research visits to Japan, using my own resources, I have been able to present a summary of the strong evidence in my most recent book, 1942, Australia’s Greatest Peril, but much more could be done.
The few historians insisting that the Japanese invasion threat to Australia in early 1942 was merely a ‘myth’ and the product of wartime Australian fears of Japan must elevate the debate by research, specifically into Japanese sources.
The Australian War Memorial has declined my suggestion that it sponsor a major seminar on the invasion issue where historians and others, particularly Japanese, could put a variety of viewpoints, contributing to a balanced and inclusive discussion fostered by the AWM.38 The Memorial had not held a conference or seminar on the broad issue since June 2002, and thus the view that had been emanating from the AWM was primarily an expression of only one side of the issue. The teaching of accurate Australian military history has taken a nasty beating that does not auger well for the comprehension of future generations. At the very least this is an area of ongoing study ripe for Australian Government assistance.
The director of the AWM, S N Gower, said in a letter:
We of course encourage and foster research and debate on a wide range of issues in Australian military history. The issues you comment upon [the invasion threat to Australia] have been thoroughly canvassed in the Australian official histories and in numerous publications by specialist historians since the 1980s. There is no real controversy surrounding them, and indeed they aroused little public or media interest when they were discussed at previous conferences at the Memorial and the Australian National University.39
So was there a Battle for Australia? Taken as a composite whole, the combined events in the first half of 1942 indicate that there certainly was. But does it matter? Surely Australians should feel free to commemorate the sacrifice in any way they please without being labelled ‘parochial nationalists’ or with other slurs.
Endnotes
1 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Thomas Cleary, Shambhala, New York, 1991.
2 Japan–Australia Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation signed in Tokyo on 13 March 2007 by Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe and John Howard, and statement to B Wurth by the Minister for Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, 7 November 2008.
3 Sadatoshi Tomioka, Kaisen to shusen: Hito to kiko to keikaku, (The opening and closing of the war: the people, the mechanism, and the planning), Mainichi Shinbunsha, Tokyo, 1968, pp. 117–18.
4 ‘Intellectual freedom’, Letter from S N Gower, Director of the Australian War Memorial, to B Wurth, 23 October 2008.
5 Dr Peter Stanley, ‘What is the Battle for Australia?’, Australian Army Journal, Winter, 2007.
6 Dr Peter Stanley, ‘Threat made manifest’, Griffith Review, Spring 2005, p. 23. (author emphasis)
7 Stanley, ‘What is the Battle for Australia?’
8 Stanley, ‘Threat made manifest’, p. 20.
9 Professor Bob Reece, Letters, Weekend Australian Review, 13–14 September 2008.
10 Dr Peter Stanley interviewed by Stephen Matchett on 30 July 2008, Higher Education section, The Australian, 30 July 2008.
11 Stanley, ‘He’s coming south (not): the invasion that wasn’t, ‘Remembering 1942’ history conference, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 31 May 2002.
12 Yamamoto’s ‘Eastern Operation’ orders to Ugaki 9 December 1941 in the Japanese war history series Senshi sosho, Daihon’ei Kaigunbu: Daitoa senso kaisen keii, Vol. 2, pp. 242–43, 300, 318.
13 John J Stephan, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1984, pp. 92–95.
14 Boei, Boei Kenshujo, Senshishitsu, Senshi Sosho: Minami Taiheiyo Rikugun Sakusen (War History Series: South Pacific Area Army Operations (1), Port Moresby-Guadalcanal first campaigns), Vol. 1, National Institute of Defense Studies, Asagumo Shinbunsha, Tokyo, 1968, p. 355.
15 Nobutake Kondo, ‘Some Opinions Concerning the War’, a study prepared for Gordon W Prange dated 28 February 1947 and translated by Masataka Chihaya, in Goldstein and Dillon (eds.), The Pacific War Papers, Potomac Books, Washington, 2004, p. 311.
16 Inoue in H P Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin, Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies February to June 1942, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 1983, p. 55.
17 Yamashita in John Deane Potter, A Soldier Must Hang: The Biography of an Oriental General, Four Square, London, 1963, pp. 11–14.
18 Muto in Hajime Sugiyama, Sugiyama Memo/Sanbo Honbu hen, Hara Shobo, Tokyo, 1989, pp. 41–45.
19 Professor David Horner, ‘High command and the Kokoda campaign’, ‘Remembering 1942’, history conference, presented by the Australian War Memorial, 31 May 2002.
20 Gavin Long, The Six Years War, Australia in the 1939–45 War, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1973, p. 175.
21 Dr Peter Stanley, ‘What “Battle for Australia”?’ ABC Unleashed, <http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2351747.htm>, 3 September 2008.
22 Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin, pp. 40–43.
23 Dr Peter Stanley, Invading Australia, Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, Viking, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 156, 157.
24 US military intelligence translation of Takushiro Hattori, Dai Toa Senso Zenshi, (The Complete History of the Great East Asia War), p. 117 of translation, held by University of Maryland. Sugiyama in ‘Explanation of materials’ in war outline guidance, [summary of debate, especially about Australia], Sugiyama Memo, translated by Kyal Hill, Tokyo, p. 11.
25 Henry P Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia, From the Sixteenth Century to World War II, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, p. 163.
26 Professor Hiromi Tanaka, interviewed on 16 August 2007 in Bob Wurth, 1942, Australia’s Greatest Peril, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2008, pp. 358–63.
27 Boei-cho (ed.), ‘Consequences of success in the early stages of the operation’ in Senshi Sosho, Pacific area army operations (1), Port Moresby–Guadalcanal first campaigns.
28 Ibid.
29 Naruhiko Higashikuni, Ichi-kozoku no Senso Nikki (War Diary by an Imperial Family Member), Nihoa Shuhosha, Tokyo, 1957, p. 106.
30 Stanley address at ‘Remembering 1942’.
31 Frei, Japan’s Southward Advance and Australia, pp. 168–69; Stanley, Invading Australia, p. 153.
32 Stanley, Invading Australia, p. 133.
33 Willmott, The Barrier and the Javelin, pp. 143–44.
34 Blamey in John Hetherington, Blamey, The biography of Field-Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey, F W Cheshire, Melbourne, 1954, pp. 134–36; Stanley on Blamey, Invading Australia, p. 133.
35 Curtin to Forde on rifles, 3 February 1942, NAA A367, M1416, 46.
36 Stanley at ‘Remembering 1942’.
37 Dr Peter Stanley on Richard Glover’s program, 702 ABC Sydney, 5 September 2008.
38 Director, Australian War Memorial, S N Gower to B Wurth, dated 23 October 2008, in reply to Wurth’s letter of 9 October 2008; and later Gower letter to Wurth dated 17 November 2008, in response to Wurth’s letter of 5 November 2008. Gower on 17 November 2008 said in part: ‘Notwithstanding, I must say that I am not persuaded to hold the conference that you seek, nor do I wish to respond to your comments as to my views, as my previous letter set out all I wish to say.’
39 Letter, Gower to Wurth, 23 October 2008.
