Overland literary journal

BATTLES OVER THE WAR

Tom O’Lincoln

• Christina Twomey: Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521612890, $37.95)
  
• Bob Wurth: 1942: Australia’s Greatest Peril (Macmillan, ISBN 9781405038607, $34.99)
  
• Peter Stanley: Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (Viking, ISBN 9780670029259, $35)

The Second World War ended over sixty years ago, yet it fascinates us to this day, and there are still many stories to be told about it.

Christina Twomey offers one of them – and it’s quite a tale. We are familiar with narratives about POW camps, but we seldom hear about civilian internees. Yet their hardships were just as great, and their different social backgrounds means their experiences were perhaps more diverse. Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners represents the best sort of academic writing: cautiously documented and phrased, yet still engrossing. It benefits from being published long years after the fact, which means that Twomey can directly confront topics that were once taboo.

Many of these centre on race. The internees were mainly white expats used to privilege, and the Japanese occupation pulled the rug from beneath them. ‘The day of the British is over,’ announced an Indian guard in Hong Kong. ‘I am ya boss.’ The former white rulers knew they were ‘in for it’. They were starved and abused, but often found imprisonment with other races – or the mere disdain of a Japanese guard who had ‘no time for whites’ – just as psychologically shattering.

Detention was not ennobling. Governor-General Michael Jeffery said in a 2004 speech that interned Australians demonstrated a ‘triumph of the enduring bonds of mateship’. But Twomey will have none of that: in reality, competition for scarce resources led to back-stabbing and episodes like the theft of children’s milk.

The revelation that the prisoners were human rather than superheroes sometimes makes them seem more appealing. Who could remain unmoved by lovers conspiring to meet in ‘broom closets, freshly dug but still empty graves, and the flat roofs of internee billets’? Twomey’s discussion of gender and sex is a rich one. Perhaps the most poignant passage describes women leaving the camps who felt obliged to make clear they had not been raped, and to rouge and powder their faces ‘to lessen for their families the shock of their appearance’.

On reaching Australia the devastated internees got little help from the government, which even billed them for their transport home. All in all Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War Two is a grim tale, albeit lifted by Twomey’s ability to capture moments of redeeming humanity on both sides.

The publicity for Bob Wurth’s 1942: Australia’s Greatest Peril presents a more familiar story. The Japanese army is on ‘its inexorable march south’, posing an ‘imminent threat’. Australia, an ‘almost defenceless nation [has been] left high and dry’. Fortunately John Curtin saves his country in its darkest days.

This is mostly bunkum. The Japanese were in no position to take their ‘inexorable’ march beyond Papua, and Australia had a considerable capacity to fight, as Kokoda showed.

Moreover, Wurth seems to know it is bunkum, since his book is generally more carefully formulated. He sets out facts, lots of them, and few with which I would argue. Yet he skews the narrative in such a way that casual readers will draw the same conclusions as the publicists, with quite a few wild statements thrown in. Was the Japanese threat really ‘ever present’ even after Kokoda? Was Curtin really ‘dead right’ to think Australia’s future was ‘up for grabs’? No, he wasn’t. Perhaps Wurth just means the PM’s fears were understandable, but readers will tend to take more than this away.

Given the excitable phrasing, readers are less likely to focus on Wurth quoting Professor David Horner, and Steven Bullard of the Australian War Memorial, about how intelligence indicated Japan would not invade. They are also less likely to grasp the full import of the intelligence material he quotes.

This is a pity, for Wurth is potentially an excellent historian. His last book revealed fascinating new information about Curtin’s relationship with a Japanese diplomat. Unfortunately, in this book he seems to have several, not entirely compatible, objectives. One is to tell ripping yarns, at which he succeeds (though he would do better not to try to create dramatic effect by shifting from past to present tense). Another is to display massive erudition, and at that he largely succeeds as well.

But these two objectives are awkwardly overlaid with a third: an attempt to combat those ‘revisionists’ (but apparently not Horner or Bullard) who declare the Japanese invasion a myth. Actually, many scholars drew this conclusion long ago, so it is hardly a revision.

Wurth does not name Peter Stanley in the book, but Stanley has written the most important recent work debunking the invasion myth and other Second World War furphies. This gets him flak from RSL types, about which he seems quite good-humoured. His (oddly misnamed) Invading Australia demonstrates that Australia was not under invasion threat.

The essential facts, which also emerge from a careful reading of Wurth, are that some senior Japanese naval officers argued for invading Australia, in the euphoric aftermath of their early victories. But the army general staff thought the idea was crazy. Which it was, given the size of this continent and the long supply lines such an invasion would have required. Australian and Allied leaders knew of Tokyo’s decision not to invade by late April, because they had broken the Japanese codes, but Curtin did not tell the people.

Some scholars believe he withheld the information cynically. In 2005 Stanley wrote: ‘Curtin had been using the invasion as a bogey to scare Australians into full mobilisation. To have altered the message would have been counter-productive.’ From Wurth we get a different picture: his Curtin is a chronic worrier who simply didn’t trust the intelligence. Stanley also suggests some other factors might have been in play.

We will never be sure what was in the PM’s head, but surely a political assessment cannot avoid harsh judgements. The government effectively lied to the Australian public for the best part of a year, not just in order to extract sacrifice from a hard-pressed labour force but for other reasons: for example, the supposed invasion danger was used to persuade young men to participate in poison gas tests.

The invasion myth is at the core of a bigger fable: the ‘Battle for Australia’, which is now celebrated officially. There was no such battle. Stanley’s concern is that grander and nobler views of the war objectives have given way to a narrow chauvinism obsessed with the specifically Australian angle. He would rather celebrate this country’s contribution to a global struggle against fascism and for democracy.

Unfortunately, that is also hard to sustain, since the Australian war effort didn’t reach full throttle until Japan entered the fray. In fact, at the onset of war with Hitler, Prime Minister Bob Menzies was content to speak of ‘business as usual’. Perhaps for this reason, Stanley tries another tack. Australia fought because:

Japanese aggression had disrupted the peace and security of the entire Asia-Pacific region. As Curtin had said in his declaration of war … Australia fought because ‘our vital interests are imperilled, and because the rights of free people in the whole Pacific are assailed’.

Alas, this argument cannot withstand serious scrutiny either. In 1937, when Japanese aggression, including the ghastly Nanjing massacre, was disrupting China, Australia’s government was fairly indifferent. As for ‘free peoples’, they were rather scarce in the Pacific. Was Indonesia, which Stanley cites, a free country? ‘We have ruled here for 300 years with the whip and the club,’ said the Dutch Governor of Java, Bonifacius de Jonge, in 1935.

Far from freeing the Indonesian people, Australia’s war restored Dutch rule. In areas where the diggers took control, they facilitated (despite magnificent pro-Indonesian solidarity efforts by some rank-and-file soldiers) the triumph of Dutch butcher Paul Westerling who, as John Keay describes in his book Last Post:

pioneered new methods in counter-insurgency. Whole villages were held responsible for Republican atrocities in their areas, their inhabitants being lined up and shot one after another until an informant spoke out. Westerling’s reign of terror is reliably estimated to have cost as many lives as the battle of Surabaya.

Emboldened by the results such methods brought, the Dutch stepped up repression in Java.

In addition, the Australian military was fighting for empire in the Pacific. The US ambassador reported H.V. Evatt’s ambitions for ‘Australian ownership or domination up to the equator’. Such were Australia’s ‘vital interests’.

Despite the anti-fascist sentiments of many allied troops, the war was essentially a ruthless power struggle between rulers. To imagine otherwise is to spin fables as gossamer as that of Japanese invasion.

Tom O’Lincoln has published a number of books on Australian Left and labour history, and is writing one on Australia’s Pacific War.
© Tom O’Lincoln
Overland 193-summer 2008, p. 83

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