Understanding the invasion myth

Since 2002 I’ve written a succession of historical pieces exploring the question of whether Japan intended to invade Australia in 1942, and reflecting on the meaning of the way Australians look at their wartime history. In Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (published by Penguin in July, 2008) I summarise and elaborate upon my research.

In this book, I place the idea of a Japanese invasion into the context of the fear of Asian aggression that Australians entertained, I looked at what actually happened in 1942, and I looked at the changing history of the way the Japanese threat has been interpreted.

In a nutshell, early in 1942, Japan’s wartime leaders thought about invading Australia. They weighed up the costs and the possible results, and decided not to. Thank goodness their fortunes changed in the course of 1942, and they never got a chance to change their minds.

Australians not unreasonably thought that having conquered most of South-East Asia the Japanese would simply keep going. It was logical - and they’d been fearful of Japanese aggression for 50 years, fears evoked by novels, plays and films. The Curtin government understandably warned Australians to prepare for attack or even invasion - as the notorious poster put it “He’s Coming South”!

In fact, “He” was not, but John Curtin and the Allied Supreme Commander in the South West Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, only understood this by about the middle of 1942. (Intercepted Japanese signals - using codes the Japanese thought were unbreakable - disclosed that Japan had decided not to invade.) By then the message had been spelled out so loudly that the Australian government could not resile from the claim that invasion was likely. In fact, Curtin did not publicly admit that the threat had been removed until mid-1943, a full year after he disclosed as much to his War Cabinet.

The legacy of wartime propaganda left most Australians pretty sure that the Japanese had planned to invade except they had been stopped at Kokoda - or was it the Coral Sea? Veterans returning with Japanese occupation currency printed in shillings for use in New Guinea - none was printed for use in Australia - seemed to buttress this popular delusion.

For 50 years after 1945 the story of the Pacific war was told pretty well uniformly across the histories of the combatant powers. No one recorded that Japan had planned to invade Australia. Then from the miid-1990s, a new interpretation arose; the “Battle for Australia” idea.

In this interpretation Japan’s intention becomes to invade Australia. Various unrelated actions around Australia’s perimeter- the bombing of Darwin, the fighting in Papua; the submarine raid on Sydney harbour - are stitched together to look like one broad operation - the Battle for Australia. This name is taken from a speech Curtin made following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, in which he anticipated that the fall of the great British base in Asia opened a “Battle for Australia”. The phrase is not history, it was a prediction - one that did not actually come to pass.

There was to be no battle for Australia. The revisionist veterans and nationalist partisans who became attracted to the Battle for Australia idea turned Curtin’s prediction into a new historical interpretation, one that has culminated in the Rudd Government announcing that September 3 is to be “Battle for Australia Day”.

We are now commemorating a battle that never actually happened. (No historian I know of agrees that there was actually a Battle for Australia: the government seems to have been persuaded in defiance of historical opinion.)

So what’s going on here? Why have Australians become so susceptible to aggrandising a battle that did not occur? What should we think about Australia’s part in World War II?

The Battle for Australia idea has taken root partly because it has been sold by a single-minded group with a shaky grasp of history but with an entirely laudable feeling that those who fought World War II should be acknowledged and respected. Sadly, they’ve sought to use unworthy means (essentially, “inventing” a battle) to achieve very understandable aims.

I share the desire of these partisans to acknowledge what Australian servicemen and women achieved, and what the war cost them. (I worked for 27 years at the Australian War Memorial, where I was head of Historical Research and then Principal Historian for 20 years. I’ve devoted most of my career as an historian to acknowledging and explaining what Australians have done in war.)

This is important, because my work will be portrayed as “revisionist” (which it isn’t - it reflects a pretty orthodox view of the history of World War II). And I will be represented as having “denigrated our war dead” or “insulted our diggers”.

On the contrary, I argue that Australians ought to be proud of the part they played in World War II. Australia entered the war at the outset, to help to defeat Nazi oppression. From December 1941 it fought against Japan’s attempt to impose a tyrannical rule upon South-East Asia. Some 40,000 Australians died in the war - very few of them in direct defence of Australia itself - but all in defence of the lives and liberties of others, in Europe and in Asia.

I think Australians ought to acknowledge and respect what its men and women did in that war. Defending Australia directly had little to do with the sacrifice and the achievements in that conflict. Imposing a “Battle for Australia” upon a history that was actually more about a battle for humanity in Europe and Asia merely distorts the real history of Australia’s part in that war.

A Battle for Australia does no honour to Australians who died at Alamein, or over Warsaw, or in the North Atlantic. It even has little to do with Australians who died at Kokoda or in Japanese prison camps.

So Invading Australia is not just about an argument about how we should interpret the events of 1942. It is also about the way Australia’s history has been subjected to manipulation and official sanction, about how a nation’s history can so easily be hijacked by partisans and lobby groups. It is about the importance of historical evidence - there is no evidence for Japanese invasion plans, but a widespread popular assumption that invasion plans must have existed.

As Invading Australia shows (drawing upon both primary sources and on the historical literature) the Japanese did not plan to invade Australia, though it also explains why such an idea should have such a tenacious longevity. The invention of the Battle for Australia detracts from the real significance of World War II for Australia, obscuring the importance of the great contribution Australia made to Allied victory far beyond Australia’s shores.

Small minded parochialism for the time being seems to have trumped clear sighted, evidence-based, historical scholarship. The debate continues, as it must.