Australia in World War Two
1939 - 1945
The rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and
the Spanish Civil War were signs that could not be ignored. The Munich Pact of 1938 came as a disillusioning shock and the country
suddenly became aware of the pitiful inadequacy of it's defences.
Ill worked and under immense pressure, Prime Minister Lyons cracked under the
strain and died in April 1939, and when war came on September 3, the main burden
fell on his successor, Robert Gordon Menzies.
Recruiting for the three services began at once and the response was keen.
Compulsory military service was reintroduced, with the proviso that conscripts
would be required to serve only in Australia and it's territories. Naval vessels
in reserve were recommissioned and work began on building others. Efforts were
made to supplement from abroad Australia's 164 combat aircraft, most of which
were already obsolete and Air Force volunteers were sent to Canada to take part
in the Empire air training scheme.
Two AIF divisions, the 6th and 7th, were formed under Lieutenant-General
Thomas Blamey and sent to Palestine for training. They were meant for service on
the western front but by June 1940, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway
had been overrun and no western front remained. However their future was
automatically settled when Italy came into the war on Germany's side and begun a
major offensive in North Africa aimed against Egypt and the Suez Canal. The
Allied counter-attack, launched in December, was spearheaded by the Australian
and New Zealand troops. By late February Bardia, Tobruk, Derna and Benghazi had
fallen, many thousands of prisoners had been taken and the Italians were in full
retreat.
Meanwhile Australian warships had been active with the British fleet in the
Mediterranean. The Sydney had sunk the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni, and
Australian ships had been conspicuous in the battles of Taranto and Matapan.
The arrival of strong German forces with powerful air support transformed the
situation in North Africa, and the Allies began a fighting retreat. In March
1941 the Australian 6th Division was relieved by the newly-arrived 7th and 9th
and moved to Greece, where a German invasion was imminent. It came, in
overwhelming strength, during April. By the end of the month Greece had fallen
and Allied troops had withdrawn to Crete. In turn Crete fell to an airborne
invasion and by early June the surviving Australians were back in Egypt. With
hardly time to rest or regroup they went into action in Syria and Lebanon
against the Vichy French, who were beaten in a five-weeks' campaign. Meanwhile
Benghazi and Derna had fallen to Rommel's Afrika Corps; Tobruk, garrisoned by
the Australian 9th Division and British troops, was under siege; and Egypt was
threatened.
In Australia the Menzies government had narrowly survived a general election
in October 1940. The following August Menzies was supplanted by A. W. Fadden
(Country Party); and two months later the government was defeated and Labour
took over with John Curtin as Prime Minister.
Hitler's invasion of Russia in August 1941 radically changed the situation in
Europe; and the whole pattern of the war was reshaped on 7 December when
Japanese aircraft devastated a United States fleet at Pearl Harbour and massive
Japanese forces invaded South-East Asia. The myth of Singapore's impregnability
was shattered three days later when the British battleships Repulse and Prince
of Wales were sunk off Malaya; and bitter jungle fighting followed as the
Australian 8th Division and other Allied troops opposed the enemy's advance down
the Malayan peninsula. Once Singapore was in Japanese hands Australia would be
seriously threatened and Curtin readily agreed to Winston Churchill's suggestion
that the 6th and 7th Divisions should be transferred from Africa to the Dutch
East Indies. But the sheer pace of the enemy advance ruled this out. Singapore
fell on 15 February 1942 and for most Australian survivors the next three and a
half years meant Changi prison or slave-labour on the Burma railway.
On 19 February Japanese carrier-based bombers attacked Darwin, sank eight
ships and killed 240 seamen, troops and civilians. The war was coming
uncomfortably close. On 23 February, against a strong protest from Winston
Churchill, Curtin ordered the returning troops to be diverted to their own
country. Ten days later Japanese aircraft raided Broome, destroyed several combat
aircraft and eight flying boats which were bringing civilian refugees from Java
and killed about seventy people.
Australia's position was critical. Her fighting strength comprised 46,000
veterans of the 6th and 7th Divisions, 63,000 AIF who had not been out of the
country and 280,000 militia. All were poorly equipped; there were practically no
tanks, no aircraft and few fighting ships. Curtin faced the situation with a
realism that won him many admirers. 'Without inhibitions of any kind,' he
declared, 'I make it quite clear that (from now on) Australia looks to America,
free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United
Kingdom.'
On orders from Washington General Douglas Macarthur flew in from the
Philippines as supreme commander, South-West Pacific Area. In his wake followed
an American fleet and thousands of troops, with equipment, munitions and
aircraft. Australia went on to a full wartime footing. Civilian labour was
directed to where it could be most useful - in munitions factories, in building
airfields and a strategic north-south road through the continent's heart, on the
docks. Food, clothing, petrol and all luxuries were rationed. (see home front)
Taxes were heavily increased and the Commonwealth government took over all
income taxation.
By now the enemy had moved into New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and
invasion seemed imminent. Then came a dramatic change. On 7 and 8 May a Japanese
fleet was intercepted and badly mauled in the Coral Sea; and early in June the
enemy suffered a crushing defeat off Midway Island, losing four carriers, a
cruiser and a destroyer. In between these battles, which were to prove crucial,
two Japanese midget submarines penetrated Sydney harbour on the night of 31 May
but succeeded only in torpedoing a ferry used as a depot ship before they were
destroyed by depth-charges.
In the western desert the position remained critical. In June Tobruk fell
after an heroic defence of fourteen months and the Afrika Corps reached to
within sixty miles of Alexandria. The Australian 9th Division was moved from
Syria to reinforce the Allies; and in October they played a vital part in
General Montgomery's decisive break-through at El Alamein, which was to
culminate seven months later in the surrender of all Axis troops in North
Africa.
Through the second half of 1942 Japanese aggression in the south-west Pacific
gradually waned in the face of stiffening Allied resistance. Guadalcanal, in the
Solomons, became a major battle-ground; an enemy assault on Milne Bay, at the
south-east tip of New Guinea, was repulsed with heavy losses; the threat to Port
Moresby was removed when Australian troops drove the Japanese back over the
Kokoda trail; and fierce fighting followed in the Buna-Gona area on the north
coast of New Guinea. In a naval engagement off Guadalcanal one of four Allied
cruisers sunk was HMAS Canberra. In the early months of 1943 there was a lull as
both sides reorganized and built up their forces. During August and September
Lae, Salamaua and Finschafen fell to the Allies and in the following month a
strong Japanese counter-attack was defeated. By mid-1944 Japanese resistance in
New Guinea had collapsed and in August Macarthur was able to move his
headquarters north from Brisbane to Hollandia, in Dutch New Guinea. Then began
the slow but inexorable process of flushing the Japanese out of the many islands
they had occupied.
Although much desperate fighting was still to come in both the European and
Pacific theatres there was little real doubt now about the eventual outcome. On
1 May 1945 Russian troops entered the ruins of Berlin and six days later the
Germans surrendered unconditionally. Against what were by this time overwhelming
odds the Japanese held out for another three months but they would have been
wiser to accept the inevitable. Early in August a new and horrifying element was
introduced when atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on 15 August
on orders from the Emperor, Japan surrendered and the war was over. Because of
the different character of the fighting Australian losses had been only about a
third of those of the First World War - 21,000 dead and 58,000 other casualties.
But psychologically the effect had been much more profound. Australia had
emerged from dependent adolescence and was now, in her own right, an adult
nation.
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