THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Britain, Australia, and the Outset
of the Pacific War, 1939-42
David Day
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989
338 pp., $ 19.95
There was a time, for a few weeks in 1942, when the most exciting place to be in the whole world was Australia. It was "a most crucial time in Australian history when the possibility of a successful Japanese invasion was very real," says David Day in this fascinating, erratic book.
At this early stage of the Pacific war we could believe the recently scorned Japanese capable of almost anything. They had knocked out the U.S. battle line at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, at a cost of only twenty-nine planes; two days later they sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the coast of Malaya, losing only four aircraft. Guam surrendered the same day; U.S. Marines fought on at Wake Island until overcome on December 23. Rabaul fell to the Japanese in January, and the Dutch lost Borneo and Celebes early in February. Japanese infantry surged relentlessly down the Malay Peninsula, and General Homma drove Douglas MacArthur's U.S. Filipino forces onto the Battaan Peninsula to await their doom.
Singapore, as Day makes clear, turned out to be considerably less than a fortress, but in the public mind it was the linchpin of Allied Pacific strategy. Winston Churchill called upon the defenders, mainly British, Indians, and newly arrived Australians, to fight "to the bitter end at all costs;" commanders "should die with their troops" for "the honor of the British Empire." All this showed "an extraordinary ignorance of psychology on the part of the authorities at home," wrote the military analyst Sir Basil Liddell Hart. In any case, it was ineffective, and Gen. A.E. Percival surrendered on February 15; the long night of prison camp fell upon sixty-four thousand soldiers, one-third of whom would die before the winds of freedom blew for them again.
Three days afterward a convoy sailed from San Francisco, carrying a regiment of U.S. Army engineer troops (to build air-fields), a pursuit (i.e., fighter) squadron to fly P-40s, which the Australians called Kittyhawks, and fourteen war correspondents (thirteen Americans, one Briton), including me. Two days out the troops were told their destination. "Australia?" said a bulldozer operator. "Is that in Africa?"
As we plowed southwestward, we sometimes wondered whether Australia would be available for landing when we got there. On February 19, Admiral Nagumo sailed his deadly carrier force--the one that had ravaged Pearl Harbor--into the Banda Sea, and his planes devastated Darwin on Australia's north coast, sinking eleven ships and sending many of the defenders, civilian and military, fleeing into the bush. With the last link to the East Indies thus removed, the Japanese invaded Java on February 28, a few hours after their navy had sent the remaining Allied cruisers and destroyers to the bottom of the Java Sea.
On March 8 Gen. Ter Poorten surrendered Java unconditionally. On the same day Japanese infantry landed at Lae and Salamaua on New Guinea's north coast. On the next day, as our transport, the Monterey, nosed into
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