The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [7]
Australia’s national security and twelve thousand miles of its coastline were left to the Australian militia, a group of poorly trained, poorly equipped home guardsmen. Australian officials feared that Japan would invade, and the Australian press shamelessly fueled these fears. Thousands of Sydney residents fled the city for the Blue Mountains fifty miles to the west; people in Darwin, Cairns, and Townsville abandoned their homes.
A month before MacArthur arrived in Australia, the country’s growing sense of vulnerability became a reality. Japanese planes bombed Darwin, killing 250 people and destroying nine ships and twenty aircraft.
A feeling of paranoia seized Australia. The Japanese had roared through Hong Kong, Malaya, Guam, Rabaul, Singapore, Java, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma. Eventually, what Japan would call its “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” would cover the entire coastline of Asia, extending from Manchuria to Rangoon, and would include the Pacific in a line running south from the Aleutian Islands. It would occupy one-sixth of the earth’s surface. The Australians feared they were next.
On February 3, Japan bombed Port Moresby, New Guinea’s largest city, for the first time. By early March, Japanese forces occupied Salamaua and Lae, two cities that were part of Australia’s New Guinea mandate. The invasion was staged from Rabaul, a small town on the island of New Britain, four hundred air miles off the New Guinea mainland, which the Japanese had overwhelmed one-and-a-half months earlier despite valiant opposition from the Australian forces garrisoned there. The Japanese transformed Rabaul into their South Sea base. With a magnificent harbor and two airfields, Rabaul held one of the largest collections of troops outside of Japan.
After the Japanese landed in New Guinea, Allied headquarters in Australia did its best to anticipate Japan’s next move. Would Premier Hideki Tojo’s army invade Australia? Whatever Japan’s plans were, there was no denying the reality—Australia, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands were the last major positions still left to the Allies in the Southwest Pacific.
On February 17, 1942, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall ordered the transfer to Australia of the 41st U.S. Infantry Division. The 41st’s mission was to protect Australia’s ports and air bases and to provide garrisons for the defense of its eastern and northeastern coastal cities. Despite the imminent arrival of the 41st Division, when MacArthur landed in Australia in mid-March 1942 he began lobbying for more troops and more planes and ships, especially aircraft carriers.
MacArthur combined his obsession with returning to the Philippines with a suspicion that the political powers in the U.S., especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the demands and influence of the navy in the Central Pacific, were depriving him of the resources he needed to wage a war (only 9 percent of U.S. supplies went to the Southwest Pacific). He complained that he was “always the underdog, and was always fighting with destruction just around the corner.” To an extent, MacArthur’s fears were justified. MacArthur and the navy brass were openly hostile to each other. Both lobbied for a finite supply of resources, for which the navy was often given preference.
Australia’s Prime Minister, John Curtin, had been waging his own personal campaign for troops for months, entreating Great Britain for its help before MacArthur ever set foot in Australia. Britain, though, had thrown herself full force against the Germans, and Churchill maintained that he did not have the troops to spare. In desperation Curtin turned to the United States.
The day after Pearl Harbor, Curtin allied Australia with the Americans, declaring that Australia was “at war with Japan.” On