The Invasion of Australia
I
‘THE sea-walls crack.’ The invasion of Australia began on January 23, 1942, with the occupation of Rabaul and the attacks on New Guinea. Smashing through the barriers of the British and American navies, Japan cut across the northern sea and air routes and stabbed down the ocean channels east of New Guinea into the Coral Sea, and west of it past the Moluccas to Darwin. The rain of bombs dropped on Darwin on February 19 brought war at last to the only continent that had never known it. The cloud that rose forty years ago on the horizon of young Australians burst with all t he fury of a typhoon out of the China Sea.
The key pass to the Blue Mountains, the one way from Sydney over the Great Divide to the Western Plains, which the baffled explorers had found after twenty years of searching, ran up the ridge on which our old home was built. ‘When the Japs come,’ our father explained, ‘this ridge is the first great line of defense, if they break through at Sydney.’ Then he quoted to us some prophetic lines written years before by Henry Lawson, the Australian poet: —
There are boys out there by the western creeks who hurry away from school To climb the sides of the breezy peaks or dive in the shaded pool,
Who’ll stick to their guns when the mountains quake to the tread of a mighty war . . . When the peaks are scarred and the sea-walls crack till the furthest hills vibrate.
So our game as boys was defending the ridge against the Japanese Army. We were confident that our bushcraft and knowledge of every inch of the bush for miles round would outwit them. But if by chance we had to retire before superior forces, then we had a refuge prepared deep in the fastnesses of the Blue Mountains, in a volcanic crater that we had discovered — really discovered, since it was quite unknown to the Government map makers. We had some tools — including an axe and a spade — hidden there in a cave. From our crater fastness we would make forays on the enemy, and even come back twelve miles through the trackless bush by night to the house to get fresh stores and tools. In our innocence we never thought of ‘scorched earth.’ It would have been unthinkable to put the torch to the old home, which we had seen built from the timber cut in the bush and had so often helped to save from the bush fires raging down the mountainside.
All this was in the first decade of Australian nationhood, from about 1900 onwards. We shared the curious, impalpable, persistent feeling of uneasiness about Japan. Australians with the instinct of frontiersmen had caught a faint something, a fleeting menace, from the actions and language of Japan. Japan had beaten the Chinese Empire; she was about to beat the Russian Empire. Japanese diplomats had expressed ‘high dissatisfaction ‘ over the White Australia policy, which was likely, they said, to be to the ‘detriment of friendly and commercial relations between Japan and Australia’; in fact it saved Australia from a Japanese fifth column. For a whole generation relations with Japan were to be the subject of whispered talk and the sport of rumor ‘painted full of tongues’: hidden friction during the Great War; diplomatic incidents at the Paris Peace Conference; the silent battle between patrol boats and Japanese pearling luggers poaching, taking soundings, and spying on the Great Barrier Reef and the far northern beaches; a Japanese fleet off Rabaul in the sanctions crisis of 1936 — the inner meaning of every word and gesture that pointed to the opening of Japan’s long-expected drive south towards Australia’s northern sea-walls. When at long last the typhoon broke on December 7 there was almost a sense of relief in Australia. Everything was at stake, but the fight was on in the open. And there was no longer any need to whisper.
II
The invasion has begun. The only questions are how far and how fast it will be pushed, the capacity of Australia to hold out till aid arrives, and whether the United Nations will succeed in keeping the Australian Base or have it turned against them by the Axis.
The Australian Government was prepared to admit that Mr. Churchill might be right in his guess that the Japanese would be too preoccupied in taking, holding, and looting the Indies and Malaya to undertake ‘a serious mass invasion of Australia.’ But it was aware, as no doubt he was, that such an invasion was clearly within the logic of the Japanese military plans. The advantages to Japan of a successful invasion were so obvious that, as the Australian Army Minister, Mr. Forde, put it, the Government had ‘to assume most gravely that an attempt will be made . . . though it is true,’ he went on, ‘ that time, distance, and physical possibilities limit the strategic employment of Japan’s armed forces.’
Australia has a clear view of the meaning of time, distance, and physical possibilities. She knows that the war is one and indivisible; has she not, alone of the United Nations except Britain and the United States, troops and airmen fighting on four continents? The General Staff has taken fully into account the probability that the high goal of the Axis is to encircle the World Island by joining hands in India — Hitler storming the western gates by breaking through to the Persian Gulf and Iran, and Japan storming the eastern gates through Burma. Mr. Curtin, the Prime Minister, has many times shown how much he counts upon the inevitable Russian attack on Japan’s vital inner flank. Australians count upon Japan breaking some of her teeth on Singapore and Java. They know that the man power of the Japanese Army, spread out from Manchuria to New Guinea, is not unlimited, and that every fresh territory conquered pins down a fresh holding force. They do not forget even the insidious drain on the Japanese Army of malaria in Malaya, Borneo, and Burma. They allow for the steady attrition of Japanese ships and planes. But they see with extreme clearness that Japan cannot rest content with holding the line of Malaya, the Indies, New Guinea, and New Caledonia. If she has the time and the strength she must go farther and destroy the great base of Australia. Because if she does not achieve this strategic objective, the United Nations will surely prepare there her doom. They knew it before Mr. Churchill told them on January 27: ‘And then, later on, from great basic areas in Australia . . . we shall be able to set about our tasks in good style in 1943.’
But the base can only be used in 1943 if it is fully secured now. If immense forces are not poured into it immediately, and the task of organizing it, as the principal basic area for the attack on Japan, is not begun at once, we may find there only a beleaguered garrison, who have had to burn much of their own factories and arsenals, and vast stores of food and raw materials.
It is a grim race against time, between the speed of the Japanese drive south and the convoys of merchant vessels moving at only half the speed of ocean liners over the vast distances of the Pacific, and of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The time between loading a fighting plane at Liverpool and assembling it ready to fly, 12,000 miles away on the great military flying field at Richmond behind Sydney, is about ten weeks; from San Francisco it is at least eight weeks. Each convoy can take only a small number of planes, tanks, and men, and each ship can make only about three voyages a year. Because of the desperate limitation on the number of ships available, it is not a matter of just one anxious period of eight or ten weeks, but of at least several such periods, stretching out for four, six, eight months. For every voyage it takes to Sydney or Singapore, each ship withdrawn from the Atlantic loses four or five cargoes from Boston to Liverpool. A convoy of twenty ships to Sydney means the loss of eighty or a hundred cargoes across the Atlantic.
But if Britain and America have their anxiety as to whether they can make it in the time, so has Japan. The fact that Japan, through surprise and careful preparation, was able to advance to Singapore and Amboina in the first two months of the war is no final measure of the progress of her drive in the next two, or four, or six months.
An invasion of Australia is a continental affair. Japan has learned in China that the invasion of a continental land mass involves endless attrition on long lines of communication. Darwin is over 2000 miles beyond Singapore, and from Darwin to Sydney is far more than the breadth of the Atlantic — 2800 miles by sea and 3000 miles by road and rail. Australia has natural defense in depth — depth of desert and sea spaces. The vital centres of population and industry are tucked away on the far east and southeast coasts. Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide hold about half the population of the country. An invasion to be successful must result in the capture or destruction of these centres.
But a hostile Japanese fleet venturing into these far waters would run the double risk of heavy attack from land-based planes and of meeting American naval units based on Sydney and Auckland since early in February after having secured and garrisoned a chain of island bases stretching back to Pearl Harbor. As Winston Churchill revealed on January 27: ‘The eastward approaches to Australia and New Zealand have been called the Anzac area and are under United States command’ and responsibility. A slow-moving Japanese fleet convoying the great fleet of transports necessary for a real invasion by a land army, and far away from its bases, would be exactly the target dreamed of by the American Navy. Even a fleet coming down from New Guinea, from the harbor (not naval bases) of Rabaul or Port Moresby, would have to venture far beyond the protection of any planes operating from the score of good airfields that exist in the New Guinea area. It would have to travel 1200 miles down the outside of the Great Barrier Reef before it could approach the Queensland coast at Rockhampton. The Barrier is true to its name. As intricate and dangerous to navigation as any sea in the world, and with every opening mined, it is safe water for American and Australian ships, but for an invading fleet a veritable Strait of Macassar flanked by airdromes.
A land invasion is easy enough. Almost anywhere along two or three thousand miles of open and unprotected coastline of Northern and Western Australia, a Japanese fleet in command of the sea could land an army without great risk. But at most points the army would have nowhere to go; it could perish of thirst trying to cross at least a thousand miles of roadless and waterless desert that has swallowed up other parties of explorers. With the doubtful exception of the country at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria, there is only one point at which an invader from the north would have much hope of success, and that is at Darwin, the head of the only transcontinental road and a strategic point of great importance for the defense of Australia.
The occupation of the uncompleted naval base and airdrome at Darwin would remove a standing menace to Japanese power in the Indies, since it is from Darwin that the counterattack of the United Nations by air and sea would be launched. Darwin is defended by heavy artillery, by a powerful garrison assembled there in April 1941 as a result of the biggest troop movement in the history of Australia, and by a certain number of bombers and fighters based on a new military airdrome, and perhaps housed in the underground hangars that were planned before the war. From Darwin the coast is patrolled by land bombers and flying boats as far east as Thursday Island, southwest down to Wyndham, and in a wide circle out over the sea to the north and westward over the Indian Ocean. It is protected against surprise attack by a radio-location system. Bombers and fighters can be flown to it in a few hours along four or five separate chains of bases from all points in Australia. But it might be outflanked by a powerful force landed on remote beaches; and it is 3000 miles from its chief sources of supply in the far south.
It was to meet just such a threat that the new all-weather military road, 600 miles long, was rushed through, late in 1940, to connect the two railheads and so link Darwin with the South. It was begun in October 1940 (a few days after Japan had shown her hand by joining up with the Axis) and finished in 93 days. Gangs of workmen on day and night shifts, working in the desert with arc lamps, pushed it forward at the rate of over six miles a day from the railhead at Alice Springs in the centre of Australia to the railhead at Birdum in the Northern Territory. The railways which the new road connects are both 3'6" gauge. The northern section of the railway is 300 miles long and the southern 700. The route follows the overland telegraph line erected in 1872 which has just been doubled the whole length of its 2000 miles to give a trunk telephone connection. This wire has been cut on numberless occasions by men dying from thirst who staked their last chance on the repair gang getting to the break in time. No repair gang would come to a Japanese army that ran out of water somewhere along the nearly 2000 miles of almost arid country they would have to cross before they could arrive at even a town, let alone a vital centre. Bombers operating from Darwin at their extreme range of 1200 miles would find only desert beneath them, except for a few small towns in the northern corner of Queensland.
Two thousand miles of natural scorched earth — sun-scorched gibber plains, red sand, tufts of white bleached grass, scattered trees with the sun blazing through their thin leaves. Along the route of an invading army, waterholes, tanks for watering sheep, and artesian bores near the route would be destroyed. There would be not a gallon of gasoline for engines or for tanks grinding their way through the desert. The railways could not be used as they were in Malaya, unless the army brought its own rolling stock with it. The troops could not live off the country as they did in Malaya. Their lines of communication would be under constant attack by troops perhaps without their equal in the world as experts in desert warfare. There would not be the slightest shelter from the ceaseless attack of bombing planes. This desert is no place for infiltration tactics. Raiding parties striking out from the main route would take their lives in their hands, haunted by thirst in a land of a few inches of rainfall a year and a hundred inches of evaporation which dries up all but the deepest waterholes. A fence that seems to promise a lead to water may be followed for a hundred miles without sight of a waterhole or a sheep station. Every sheep or cattle station has a radiotelephone transceiver, operated by bicycle pedal, to flash news of a raiding party to the nearest airdrome.
Invasion by land forces from the north or northwest is possible, but the transport difficulties under war conditions would be staggering, as Libya shows. But the distances involved are many times those of Libya, and they are inland distances far from the sea. Invasion by air over such distances is hardly practicable unless it can be followed up simultaneously by land armies — as the German failure in Syria and Iraq showed.
III
But the Australian General Staff is in no danger of underestimating the magnitude of the task of defending a continent with twelve thousand miles of coastline and a population of seven millions. It has had no illusion that the continent can be held indeflnitely without aid from outside against a great power able to attack at leisure with all its resources. But its plans were made on the assumption that the British Navy would not be able to come to the rescue in the early stages of a war, and that Australia must be able to hold out against an attack in force by an invader having command of the sea and able to land armed forces on many parts of the vast coastline.
The principal ports are defended by heavy guns able to beat off a direct attack from the sea. But bombardment from the sea and bombers from aircraft carriers might inflict heavy damage on vital points on the seacoast like the naval base and workshops at Sydney, and the steel mills at Newcastle and Kiama, north and south of Sydney. The Australian Field Army, as planned before the war, was to be 200,000 strong when on a war footing. It was planned, as the Defense Minister put it, to force the enemy to come with such large convoys that he would be highly vulnerable to air attack when nearing the coast, in any part of the more closely settled area from Brisbane to Melbourne or Adelaide.
Despite the fact that the total armed forces sent abroad (Army, Navy, and Air Force) were known to be from 170,000 to 250,000 men, the armed forces available in Australia at the beginning of the year numbered 250,000 men. In addition there was a home guard of 50,000 tough veterans from the last war. Moreover, since Japan struck there has been something in the nature of a general mobilization, a levée en masse of all the available man power in the country, for service in the Army or in the defense industry. A volunteer Defense Corps for all men from 18 to 60 was formed. The total number of males in these age groups was put in the census of 1933 as 1,926,000. As Lord Kitchener once pointed out, a great deal of the training that in the ordinary course would have to be supplied to obtain an efficient soldier ‘is already a part of the daily life of the Australian.’ Out of such material, with intense training, a much larger armed force can be raised in a comparatively short time — if time is available. But in the process war industry, which already in 1941 absorbed 210,000 men, would be likely to suffer.
It is not very profitable to compare this Australian Army with the forces — in all not much more than 100,000 — that opposed Japan in Malaya and in the Philippines. Because, as the Senior Officer’s Report on National Defense after the Great War pointed out, ‘a considerable dispersal of troops is inevitable,’ owing to the great extent of the Australian coastline and the transport facilities. The Army Minister announced in January that the Army was ‘divided into two great military commands,’ one for Western Australia and the other for the five eastern states.
The factor of mobility depends on the road and railway system and the aviation facilities. A Rail and Road Coördination Authority was set up in June 1941 to coördinate the five separate road and rail systems in the five mainland states. The road system has been revolutionized since the Great War, giving the Army a far greater degree of mobility. But it is inevitably far below the level in the United States. The immensity of the great distances has to be remembered. Sydney to Darwin, Brisbane to Perth, are each far more than the breadth of the Atlantic. Adelaide is as far from Perth (with which it is connected by air and rail, but not by road) as London is from Istanbul.
The railway system, for a population no greater than that of New York City, reaches the extraordinary figure of 27,973 miles of track. It is run by the States and the Commonwealth with a high degree of efficiency. The strain on the main trunk lines has been somewhat eased by the building of parallel and connecting lines of strategic importance behind the Dividing Range. But the system is cursed by a difference of gauges, which, despite the recommendation of the War Railway Council in 1911 and endless reports and discussions since, still remains as a grave menace to the security of the country in time of war. Moreover, with an enemy fleet off the coast much of the heavy tonnage carried by the interstate shipping fleet would be thrown upon the railways. But these difficulties can perhaps be exaggerated. In a real invasion crisis the roads and railways could probably carry the extreme burden pluced upon them.
Air transport has been developed to a higher point in Australia than in any other country in the world with anything like the same population. The country is ideal for flying and the population is air-minded. Before the war there were 257 government airdromes and emergency landing fields, as well as 230 licensed public airdromes; and the system has been greatly expanded during the war. Workshop units for aircraft maintenance are being set up in areas as widely separated as possible, with central factory repair establishments in Sydney and Melbourne. The whole continent is circled by airdromes as well as crossed in three or four directions by well-organized air routes.
Data regarding the size of the Air Force are not available. A number of squadrons are stationed abroad. Reinforcements from Britain and the United States have arrived and are still arriving. The force was composed largely of Australian-built Beaufort bombers and Wirraway general-purpose machines, of British bombers and fighters, and of a certain number of American bombers. Eighty-six Lockheed Hudsons had been received by April 1940, and a number of American bombers have been flown across the Pacific since that date. A thousand airplanes of Australian manufacture were in the air last October. The production rate is about 200 a month and still mounting. It was decided early in February to stop the manufacture of trainers and to concentrate wholly on the manufacture of bombers and fighters. A new type of bomber, in addition to the Bristol Beaufort, is going into production. The Royal Australian Air Force, part of which is abroad, now comprises 70,000 pilots, air gunners, and observers.
The main equipment of the Field Army consists of light tanks, Bren-gun carriers, a heavier armored vehicle, light artillery, with some batteries of heavy guns, anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft guns. How much equipment is in the country and how much abroad is a military secret. But it is probable that the Army is still lightly armed, compared with the armaments so far available to the Japanese expeditionary forces.
No country that Japan has invaded in the ten years of her aggression had a munitions industry remotely comparable to that of Australia. Since the last war, and above all since the present war began, Australia has gone through a technological revolution. The number of those employed in war industry, which was less than 5000 at the outbreak of the war, was already over 200,000 last summer. Steps have been taken to close down industries not vital to the war effort and to transfer the labor into war industry. The regulations adopted on February 19, the day the Japanese bombed Darwin, involved complete regimentation of the whole man power of the country, and have greatly speeded up the plan to transfer in 1942 another 160,000 men from civil to war industry.
Great munitions plants have been established. There are fifty firms manufacturing machine tools where there were two small firms in 1939. These munitions factories are turning out (in some cases in sufficient quantities for export) airplanes, Bren guns and carriers, light tanks and armored vehicles, light and heavy artillery, anti-tank and antiaircraft guns and predictors, naval guns, optical instruments of military importance, shells of all sizes, explosives, bombs, torpedoes and mines, and a great variety of other equipment. A chain of small arms factories has been established at strategic points. Sixty or seventy million rounds of Australian small arms ammunition were sent to England in 1940 for use by the British Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Fifty small naval vessels, including destroyers and at least one cruiser, are being built. Sixty merchant vessels of 9200 tons each and powered with Australianmanufactured marine engines are being constructed over a five-year period.
Much of this industry is new to the country. Australia manufactured airplanes before she began the manufacture of automobiles. There has been at the same time a great expansion in mining and metallurgical production. The manufacture of aluminum has begun. The steel output has doubled and is now about two million tons annually. In addition to blast furnaces and steel mills at Newcastle, Kiama, and Lithgow in New South Wales, blast furnaces have been erected at Iron Knob in South Australia, so that the ships carrying iron ore from there to Newcastle can return with cargoes of coal for the new smelters.
IV
The great importance of Australia to the United Nations as a strategic base, a reservoir of highly trained man power, an arsenal of munitions and a storehouse of supplies, thus becomes clear. Even its armed forces exceed those of all the governments in exile and the Netherlands Indies combined. It is making a very important contribution, through the Eastern Group Supply Council and Central Provision Office in Delhi, to the needs of all the countries supplied through these bodies, especially India, New Zealand, and the Netherlands Indies. One recent order filled by Australian factories for the Eastern Group Supply included 3,000,000 blankets, 7,200,000 pieces of underclothing, 3,000,000 pullovers and jackets, 1,000,000 pairs of boots, 7,000,000 pairs of socks, 400,000 uniforms, and 250,000 overcoats. The billion pounds of wool produced annually by Australian sheep give the armies of the democracies an advantage over the less well clad armies of the Axis. Under an agreement with Britain in 1941 heavy stocks of storable foodstuffs have been accumulated in the country as a reserve to be drawn on when shipping conditions permit, or for use after the war.
Australia has all the metals and other raw materials necessary for arms manufacture except nickel, which is obtained in near-by New Caledonia. She even supplied 400,000 tons of steel to Britain in an early stage of the war. Her reserves of high-grade coal exceed those of the whole of the rest of the Southern Hemisphere. The one great strategic weakness is lack of oil. Up to 1939, thirty years of searching and drilling produced hardly enough to fill a large tanker. In the ominous words of the Commonwealth Year Book, ‘natural oil does not exist in Australia.’ But large reserves, some in underground storage, have been accumulated and oil is now being distilled from shale.
The stage of industrial production already reached, the self-sufficiency of the country in the matter of raw materials, and the entry of the United States into the war open up an important new possibility. The acute shipping problem of the United Nations, which is more likely than any other single factor to prolong or possibly lose them the war, can be relieved somewhat by carrying further the decentralization of war industry which the British Commonwealth adopted as a policy at the Imperial Conference of 1937. A small convoy of ships with American machine-tools and workmen would make it possible to set up in Australia large plants, using local raw materials, for the manufacture of tanks and fighting planes for the use of the Australian, British, and American armed forces based on Australia.
This is the prize for which Britain and America race Japan. It must not be assumed, from the sharp appeals for aid from Britain and America by the new Labor Government in Canberra, that London and Washington are not fully aware of the magnitude of the stake in Australia. As the Australian War Minister himself has said: ‘Many great movements’ of armed forces are secretly being carried out by the United Nations, and ‘Australia may yet become the principal offensive base from which the Allies will embark upon the reconquest of Asia and the Pacific.’ American naval units and some American troops and supplies have arrived. The British Navy is not idle in the Indian Ocean. This is the bright side of the picture.
The other side is black. Even by cutting Australia off from the sea, without invasion, Japan can rob the Allies of one of their greatest arsenals, of vast stocks of essential foodstuffs and raw materials such as wool, of a powerful army of shock troops, and of an annual contingent of 20,000 air pilots, gunners, and observers. An invasion, striking at the principal cities, could turn the productive part of Australia into scorched earth. And finally, the occupation of Australia by the Axis would mean loss of Allied Command of the sea in the Indian Ocean as well as in the Pacific, and the breakdown of the blockade of the Axis. The Allies themselves would be cut off from the supplies from the whole of Eastern Asia and Oceania, as they are now cut off from Europe.
The prize to be won in Australia is great; but the penalty for losing it is far greater. It means the loss of the last base for the recovery of Oceania and the beating of the Japanese back into their islands. Australia is the southern anchor of the United Nations. By taking it Japan would build a dividing fence right across the globe from the Kuriles to Tasmania. The conquest for the first time in history of one of the English-speaking nations would be a most serious blow to the prestige of those left. The Australian Government believes that full-scale invasion will be attempted by states, beginning first perhaps with Darwin, Port Moresby in Papua, and the seizing of Thursday Island and air bases in North Queensland. The destruction of the large oil fuel stores at Darwin (which is a naval oil refueling and not a refitting base since it lacks docks) would be a strategic objective of the first importance, because these stores are probably irreplaceable. After that no man can say. Australia has fought Japan in Malaya and Java. Her armies of upwards of 200,000 fighting the Axis abroad are not being brought back. More were rushed to Singapore, and more to Java. The cracking of its sea-walls has not daunted Australia’s offensive spirit but has brought it to white heat.