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The Enemy at the Gate, February-March 194 2 Uring

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The Enemy at the Gate, February-March 194 2 Uring CHAPTER 2 THE ENEMY AT THE GATE, FEBRUARY-MARCH 194 2 1—THE FALL OF SINGAPOR E URING January and early February the Japanese advanced down D the Malay Peninsula. They made landings in Borneo, Celebes an d Ambon. They spread steadily over the whole of the Philippines . They overran southern Burma . Singapore fell on 15th February . It had held out for a fortnight instea d of the six months mentioned in the British forecasts. In the Battles of the Java Sea and Sunda Strait from 27th February to 1st March th e Allies lost five cruisers and most of their few remaining destroyers . The Australian cruiser Perth was sunk on 1st March and the sloop Yarra on the 4th. In Burma the British forces withdrew up the Irrawaddy from Rangoon . During the first week of March the Japanese occupied Jav a and the Government of the Netherlands East Indies was evacuated to Australia . On 8th March the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea. Thus, in less than a month, the Malayan barrier had crumbled and the naval forces which had been assembled to hold it had been beaten . Japanese air raids on the Australian mainland began on 19th February with two attacks on Darwin, and continued through March and Apri l at Darwin, Wyndham and Broome with some hundreds of casualties and damage to shipping, oil installations and aerodromes . In Papua, Por t Moresby was attacked from the air in 21 raids during February and during March. In early February New Guinea and Papua passed under martial law. l Almost daily for the first three months of the new year bad news fed the fears of the Australian Government and supported its urgent appeal s for aid. Moving with the course of events, the whole emphasis of th e Australian war effort changed to the defence of the Australian mainland . Appeals for strengthening the outer barrier gave place to anxiety for th e security of the base . "The fall of Singapore," said the Prime Minister on 16th February, "can only be described as Australia 's Dunkirk. It will be recalled that the fall of Dunkirk initiated the Battle for Britain . The fall of Singapore opens the Battle for Australia . On its issue depends not merely the fate o f this Commonwealth but the frontier of the United States of America and , indeed, all the Americas, and therefore, in large measure, the fate of th e English-speaking world . He would be a very dull person who could not 3 War Cabinet Minute 1869, 5 Feb 1942 ; Agendum 82/1942. Gazetted in Canberra 12 Feb ; by Administrator in Port Moresby in a Gazette Extraordinary on the 14th (to operate from noon) . See also Section 6 of this chapter and Appendix 2, "Civilian Wartime Experience in the Territories of Papua and New Guinea. " THE FALL OF SINGAPORE 71 discard all his preconceived ideas of strategy and war and who does not accept the fall of Singapore as involving a completely new situation ."2 The sequence of defeats in early 1942 seemed to Australians at the tim e to lead up to or flow as a consequence from the fall of Singapore . There the disasters to Allied arms were exposed in one great event. The fall of Singapore shocked the Australian people and Government as the greates t disaster of the war . The loss of over 17,000 servicemen—equivalent, i n proportion to population, to a loss of 100,000 by the United Kingdo m or 300,000 by the United States of America—brought anxiety into many homes and in one catastrophe removed almost a quarter of the Australia n expeditionary forces . That human loss was accompanied by the destructio n of a great legend which had sustained most of the popular ideas abou t Australian security. For at least ten years the idea of an impregnabl e Singapore, base for a superior British fleet, had been in the forefron t of Australian discussion of defence. A small band of professional and amateur tacticians may have had doubts for many years whether this legen d had any substance behind it, but the legend was foremost in all publi c pronouncements and in most popular and political notions regarding th e safety of Australia . Earlier in the war, when the A.I.F., the most modern units of the Royal Australian Navy, and thousands of airmen had gone overseas, there had been repeated assurances that, so long as Singapore stood, the Australian homeland would be secure, and promises had bee n repeated that if ever the need arose Singapore and the fleet would b e reinforced so that they would be sure to prevail. Even after Japan struck and, in the disasters of Pearl Harbour and the Malayan coast, it becam e clear that Allied naval superiority had gone, the certainty that Singapore would hold out for the necessary six months until new strength arrive d had been reasserted . The Japanese would never get past Singapore an d while Singapore was held the Malayan-Indonesian barrier would stand . The shock of the fall of Singapore was mingled with some bitterness . It had not been the fault of Australia . She had put in one of her four A.I.F. infantry divisions. It was the fault of someone else . Someone wh o had not sent the reinforcements in time . Someone who had failed to provid e the aircraft. Someone who had bungled supplies. Someone who ha d planned the whole thing badly . Someone who had not paid enough hee d to the warnings and the opinions that Australians had offered beforehand . Neither the Australian Government nor the majority of the Australian people felt at the time that the fall of Singapore was in any way thei r failure. Rather they had been let down by others. That feeling, a key to the understanding of Australian conduct, was not the response to a moment of defeat . It was the result of an abrupt ending of long years of delusion—the delusion of independence—during which Australia had been asserting independence but had been relying on the protection of Grea t Britain to ensure Australian survival . Being human, Australians felt, no t that they had deluded themselves, but that they had suffered injury becaus e the circumstances in which they could continue proudly independent ha d z Digest of Decisions and Announcements, No . 19, p . 7. 72 THE ENEMY AT THE GAT E vanished. Australia was wounded in her self-respect as a nation and thos e wounds were very tender . Furthermore Australia was believed to be in danger . After the fall of Singapore, the Java Sea and Sunda Strait Battle, the overrunning of th e Netherlands Indies and the landings in New Guinea, Australia saw the enemy at her threshold . It was known later that the Japanese did not intend to invade the Australian mainland and that by the end of February 194 2 were not in a position to mount a successful invasion . But in Australia itself there was at the time a conviction, both among members of th e Government and among the people, that the invaders would soon come . The repeated raids on Darwin; the pursuit of refugees from Malaya and Indonesia down the Western Australian coast ; the occupation of Timor and Ambon; the assembling of transports in Rabaul harbour ; the landings on the New Guinea coast ; the occupation of Christmas Island and th e Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean—what could these be but the preparations for an attempt sooner or later to overwhelm Australia? I f Australia were occupied, what chance would there ever be for the Allies to fight back against Japan and deliver the occupied territories of southern Asia? That expectation of early invasion has also to be appreciated i f Australian actions are to be understood . The fall of Singapore precipitated the question which the Australia n Government had been vainly, and perhaps clumsily, trying to isolate ever since the Japanese attack . The security of Australia was not only a matter of the safety of the people inside Australia but also one of the corner- stones of Allied victory in the Pacific . Undoubtedly Australian views wer e dominated by a very lively and natural fear for the safety of Australia itself, and the note of scolding, querulousness and alarm which crept int o some of the Australian communications on such subjects as reinforcement s and supplies may have made it difficult for the British and Americans a t times to appreciate that there was more behind their messages than a narrow Australian concern with narrow Australian needs . Those com- munications did, however, also express a reasoned estimate of the cours e of the war and strategical arguments which had come not simply out of the emergency facing Australia but as the fruit of many years ' thinking about the possibility of war in the Pacific . The fear of an invasion of the Australian mainland was extremely acut e in Australia between February and June 1942, just as a similar fear had been acute in the British Isles in the second half of 1940, and it s influence lingered after the occasion for the fear had passed . As in the case of the British Isles, while the fear lasted the claims of other battle - fronts took second place to the protection of the homeland, and th e preservation of the homeland was also seen as vital to the continuanc e of the war. The assurance that invasion was unlikely was unconvincin g to those who stood in fear of it.
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