The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [146]
Regarding what was called the “Brisbane Line,” in his book 1942, Winston Groom suggests that MacArthur was having “none of” it, and that early on he had decided to take the war to New Guinea. William Manchester remains skeptical of the claim. It was revisionist and self-serving, a fiction first advanced by MacArthur in order to portray himself to history as a decisive commander. MacArthur, Manchester maintains, sent Australian and American troops to New Guinea only when there was no other course of action available to him. In his book There’s a War to Be Won, Geoffrey Perret is critical of MacArthur’s tendency for self-promotion. “This banal truth,” Perret wrote of MacArthur’s decision to accept Australia’s defensive posture, “would seem to be in conflict with the legend of MacArthur the Bold.” According to Perret and David Horner, too, MacArthur bolstered his own image by promoting a “fiction in which he’d found the Australians craven and defeatist.”
Regarding the threat to Australia, there is an ongoing and heated discussion taking place in Australia about whether or not Japan ever intended to invade. Dr. Peter Stanley delivered a paper titled “He’s (Not) Coming South: The Invasion That Wasn’t” at an Australian War Memorial conference. To this day, many people believe that Australia was Japan’s target. Yet Japanese war documents indicate that on March 15, 1942, the Army and Navy Sections of the Imperial General Headquarters dismissed the idea of an attack on the Australian mainland. The Japanese navy championed the idea, but the army demurred. After the war, Premier Hideki Tojo argued that Japan had dismissed the idea of invading Australia as early as March 1942 because it would require too many troops. Instead, Japan opted for a plan to seize Port Moresby, occupy the southern Solomon Islands, and isolate Australia by controlling the air space and the oceans so that the Americans could not use it as a base for offensive actions. Neither Allied Headquarters, Australia’s Joint Chiefs, nor the people of Australia were privy to this information, though. Stanley maintains that Prime Minister Curtin in particular exaggerated the threat.
On the subject of the Japanese invasion, army historian Samuel Milner seems to be of two minds. He writes: “Instead of approving an operation against the Australian mainland, the Japanese agreed to seize Port Moresby as planned and then, with the parallel occupation of the southern Solomons, ‘to isolate Australia’ by seizing Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia…. The plan said nothing about invading Australia; it did not have to. If everything went well and all objectives were taken, there would be enough time to begin planning for the invasion…. It was clear from the circumstances that the Japanese had not given up on the idea of invading Australia. They had merely laid it aside….”
For a description of the panic that existed in Australia, I relied Paul Ham’s Kokoda, Peter Brune’s books, and David Day’s The Great Betrayal and The Politics of War. Milner and Ham both do an excellent job of presenting the jockeying and deal making that went on after MacArthur arrived in Australia.
Regarding MacArthur’s burning ambition to return to the Philippines in triumph, General Brett provides interesting insights into MacArthur’s character. He writes, “The fulfillment of his promise to return to the Philippines seemed years away. He was a disappointed and unhappy man…. MacArthur retired into his ivory tower to plan the campaigns ahead. The planning was long range…. I don’t believe he gave much thought to our immediate problems.” Brett compares MacArthur to Marshall. Marshall, he says was “one of the clearest-thinking, least temperamental men” he had ever known. On the