Our (so called) Battle for Australia
The following article was published in Quadrant by Peter Ryan – a veteran of our New Guinea campaigns and author of ‘Fear Drive my Feet’.
Just over a hear ago, the Minister for Veteran’s Affairs (Alan Griffin) announced that the Governor-General (then Major General Michael Jeffery) had signed a proclamation creating a new day of national celebration and remembrance: Battle for Australia Day.
Its purpose, broadly understoon, was to promote wider recognition of the achievements of Australian forces against the Japanese in the Pacific War; equally, to enhance and entrench remembrance and respect for those who had died or suffered for their country in the perilous years 1941 to 1945.
Such intentions are surely acceptable to all decent Australians. Now is a good moment to assess the progress made over the years, and to consider whether our new national day is heading in the right direction.
Battle for Australia Day, we learned, would be the last first Wednesday in each September. It was a date without any stirring resonance, though it was close to the anniversary of our celebrated victory at Milne Bay in 1942, and to that of our declaration of war on Germany in 1939. But it was probably chosen for the more prosaic reason that it would not clash with the school holidays. This was not a brilliant start.
During serveral earlier years the fortunes of the idea of a Battle for Australia Day had been the care of a voluntary council. They were men of some standing – mostly ex-service officers of senior rank; there was a branch in each Australian state. The effect of last year’s proclamation was to slot both ‘the Day’, and the council into the official apparatus of government. Mr Griffin stated that there would be no public holiday.
But the minister stressed that the proclamation and its consequences ” delivered on a Labor Party election promise”. That is to say, it was a partisam move from one side of politics. (Not that the conservatives failed to scramble aboard the now-moving tram. No politician is a party-ppoper if an ex-service vote might be put at risk.)
Keen observers spotted immediately the connection of the campaign befun by formeer prime minister Paul Keating, on his visit to Kokoda in 1992. Bending down to kiss the sacred earth where blood had spilled “In defence of the liberty of Australia”. Mr Keating provided generous photo-opportunities for the upraised prime ministerial buttocks. (I remember writing at the time how fortunate it was that I happened nto be standing idly by in the vicinity.)
The Left always covets a larger slice and a firmer grip on Australia’s military tradition; one senses their ideological unease with its imperial origins, and its later inescapable relationship to an overwhelmingly powerful ally. They would probably like to incorporate the Diggers intto their readical national story like the shearers of the 1890s. They would greatly prefer the story of Australian arms to have a stronger flavour of “alone we did it”. This would flatter our self-importance. But would it be true?
The authentic military tradition of a nation, oddly, is both delicate and robust; it develops according to its own mysterious rules. It simply wilts if tweaked this way and that by the clumsy fingers of contending ideologies. It can behave surprisingly; a perverse concern for “militray honour” was an important ingredient in the infamous case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, which so bitterly divided French society for many decades.
One night in 1941 I saw the subtle springs of soldierly tradition rise unexpectedly to the surface. As we yarned in the darkened tent after lights-out in a recruit camp near Me,bourne, it emerged that every one of us young volunteers was the son of a father who had served abroad in the War of 1914-18 – Gallipoli, France and elsewhere. Rather shyly (after all, we had only met two days ago) we spoke of their deeds. Silence fell. Then, from our lance-corporal: “I only hope, when the time comes, that none of us will let the old blokes down.”
That was military tradition at work – quiet and deep.
Though saluting its good intentions and its hard work, I do not believe that the Battle for Australia Council had put many runs on the board in the past year; nor do I think it ever can. Its foundations are cracked, and no sturdy structure is likely to rise on them.
Alas, the conception of a “Battle for Australia” rests on two false propositions: first, that in the Second World War the Japanese planned to invade and occupy Australia; second, that the Australians beat them in the consequent “battle”. There is no respectable historical support for either of these premises.
The Japanese archives suggest no credible intention to “invade”. After we cracked Japan’s “watertight” codes, no signal traffic ever hinted at invasion. After the Coral Sea and Midway Island naval battles (May and June 1942, and well before Kokoda, (the Japanese lacked all practical resources to launch a continental invasion anywhere. But, anxious to support their “invasion” scenario at all costs, Australian “true believers” go on producing far-fetched and flimsy “evidence”. We have, for example, Japanese “invasion money”, a canard as absurd as the First World War story that Russian soldiers from the Eastern Front had been spotted in London “with snow on their boots”.
As a last resort, invasion theorists argue that because some Australians at the time might have believed that an invasion was imminent, then their theory is “as ggod as true”. But a belief (and a false one at that), falls far short of a fact.
The crucial phrase “Battle for Australia” was spoken loosly by a desperately distraught John Curtain amid the havoc of the fall of Singapore. One looks in vain for its well-considered contemporary use elsewhere. Applied in its present-day context, the term is an abuse of language, and seriously misleading. What we fought (and eventually won) was a “campaign – a series of military operations . . .)
Our campaigns comprised numerous battles throughout the precisely defined South-West Pacific Area, a theatre of war drawn on the map by the American Chiefs of Staff, and confirmed bu the world leaders Churchill and Roosevelt. The Allies (Australians, American, British and Dutch) in varying combinations from time to time fought their widespread battles by air, land, sea and submarine, but not one of them was fought to repel an invasion of our continent. The idea of a distinct Battle for Australia is a nonsense.
My veteran mates served long, had and wide, from Kokoda to Borneo, but they scoff at the idea of a Battle for Australia. A typical comment: “Battle for Australia? You’ve got me there, mate. Maybe I slept throught that one.”
We have to face – even the Left has to face this simple truth – that all Australian forces in the South-West Pacific Area fought under the supreme command of US General Douglas MacArthur, who held our prime minister, John Curtin, in the hollow of his hand. Our contribution to final victory was a heroic and an noble one. (In proportion to population, more Australians served in uniform than Russians.
But we were never more than one member of the team.
The work of the Council for the Battle for Australia could have unhapopy (if unintended ) consequences. For example, will its exaggerated attention to the war on our doorstep come toovershadow and devalue the contributions of our airmen in Britain, our sailors in the Mediterranean, our soldiers at Tobruk and El Alamein?
On the Veteran’s Affairs website, one is not reassured by reading that the Australian History Teachers Association has been recruited to assist the Council. The Associatoin is not a body famous for its qualities of detachment and impartiality. One asks, where were they when Australia’s greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, was being hounded from his Chair at the University of Melbourne?
Perhaps our present direction of Australian military history threatens to take us just a little too seriously, and to pump up unduly our already lively senso of our importance. It would be embarrassing if the rest of the world came to see us as filling rhe role of that cocky urchin who pedals around furiously, shouting: “Look, Mum! No hands!”
Quadrant
September 2009
September 6th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Only a committee could select a day to commemorate a battle that never happened! Peter Ryan’s observation that it ‘is a date without any stirring resonance’ is correct. Wartime Prime Minister John Curtin’s statement that the ‘Battle for Australia’ has now begun – after the fall of the Singarpore ‘fortress’ in December 1941 – is a very thin thread for such a proclamation.
Anybody familiar with the ‘politics’ of our ex-service communities knows that it would be impossible to get them all to agree on an appropriate day. Should it commemorate the battle of the Coral Sea – or Midway; the bombing of Darwin; the first contact between the 39th Militia Battalion and the Japanese at Oivi; the first defeat of the Japanese at Milne Bay; or the recapture of Kokoda?
There is no argument against the need to select an appropriate day to commemorate the sacrifice of our veterans during the Pacific War. Whilst we may not have been invaded we were bombed (more heavily that Pearl Harbour); torpedoed; and threatened for the first time in our relatively short histlry. Our mandated territory of New Guinea was invaded. The threat of an imminent invasion on our mainland was real.
Whilst there was not a defining battle for Australia as stated by Ryan, there were certainly a number of campaigns that brought about the defeat of the Japanese forces in the Pacific.
I believe the most appropriate day to commemorate our involvement in the Pacific War is the day our troops raised the Australian flag on the Kokoda plateau. This would never have happened if our naval forces had not defeated the Japanese invasion fleets at Coral Sea and Midway; our RAAF pilots had not bombed and harrassed Japanese naval movements and flew off corrugated landing strips at Milne Bay; our commandos had not harrassed Japanese forces at Wau; and so on.
The raising of the Australian flag on the Kokoda plateau on 3 November 1942 has resonance because of the symbolism of the occassion.
This day should be proclaimed as ‘Kokoda Day’. A small ceremony involving the raising of our flag in all schools would be reminder of the historic battles fought to defend Australia during the Pacific War from 1941 – 1945.
For this to happen the Australian government will have to rise above petty inter-unit, inter-association and inter-service jealousies and excercise a degree of leadership – which means it will probably never happen!