Donald Horne by Horne Donald;Horne Nick;

Author:Horne, Donald;Horne, Nick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.

THE AUSTRALIA DISCUSSION

11

THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE

Having written his ‘snapshot’ of how Australia seemed in the 1960s, The Lucky Country, D.H. had ‘a go at the whole thing’ in 1972. He wanted to write a history that might suggest some answers to the question: how did Australians become what they are? Here he looks at the 1940s.

The orphans of the Pacific

TROOPS IN AUSTRALIAN ARMY CAMPS WOKE ON 8 December 1941 to discover that Japanese aircraft had bombed the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor and blown up much of the US Pacific fleet. By nightfall many of the troops were moving to improvised battle stations here and there on the 19,000-kilometre coastline. At dawn they stood to, facing sand and sea. The Japanese invaded Malaya and the Philippines; after two days they sank the two warships Churchill had sent to defend the region and seized Guam; a fortnight later Hong Kong surrendered; five days more and the Americans evacuated Manila; another two weeks and Australian soldiers were fighting to defend the approaches to Singapore; a fortnight after that, they withdrew to the island of Singapore; a week later the Japanese attacked. A week later Singapore fell, and into the smoke and flame of its quick destruction went the whole edifice of Empire defence. With a loss in prisoners of war proportionate to 100,000 British or 300,000 Americans, to Australians the disasters of Singapore could seem one of the greatest military defeats of the twentieth century. All the newspapers beat the drums that signalled, in effect, the failure of Empire: ‘There have been few more serious miscalculations in all British history.’ ‘The results continue to be tragedy after tragedy, based on blunder after blunder.’ The Prince of Wales had sworn in 1920 that as Australia stood by the Empire, so the Empire would stand by Australia. This had not proved to be true: there was talk of ‘guilty men’, and, among some, of British chicanery.

Surprise air raids on Darwin left blazing oil tanks, sunken ships, broken buildings: the Australian Chief of Staff warned that a Japanese invasion in the north might be expected early in April and an attack on the east coast in May. In Japan, General Tojo mocked Australia as ‘the orphan of the Pacific, helplessly expecting Japan’s attack’. Guerilla groups formed; there were suggestions for squads of blacktrackers and there was talk on both the Right and the Left of a ‘people’s army’. Some harbourside flats in Sydney emptied. Barbed wire and sandbags went up on its beaches. Signboards were pulled down, small boats impounded; 80,000 cattle were overlanded from the north to the south so that the Japanese couldn’t eat them. There were plans for a scorched earth policy. Government departments moved their archives to safe places.

Two of the volunteer Divisions were brought back from the Middle East, and another 114,000 men were conscripted to add to the 132,000 already drafted into the militia, but there was a soreness about both the dispersal of forces home from Empire defence and the inadequate equipment and training of the home forces.

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