The political decisions and policy leading to the Royal Australian Air Force having no fighters or interceptors for the coming war against Japan James Rorrison BA; Honours Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology 2015 KEY WORDS Australian aircraft industry; Australia’s Air Defence; Beaufort; Sir Winston Churchill; John Curtin; Billy Hughes; Interwar politics; Joseph Lyons; Sir Robert Menzies; Messerschmitt; Milestones in military aircraft; Mustang; Royal Air Force; Royal Australian Air Force; United States Army Air Corps; War against Japan; Warplanes; Weapons of World War I; Weapons of World War II; Wirraway; World War I; World War II; Zero. i ABSTRACT One of the most dangerous, illusional and deceptive of Australian pre-World War 11 beliefs was that the British represented a powerhouse of military protection against any foreign intimidation. In reality they impersonated a defence system without substance and an actual siphon of Australia’s military resources towards their own ends while offering only a potentially high-risk strategic alliance that helped bring Australia to the brink of disaster. As just one outcome on 18 January 1942, over two months after the Japanese air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, less than half a squadron of Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Wirraway lightly armed training planes alighted from an airstrip at Rabaul on New Britain ostensibly to intercept a Japanese naval air armada of over one hundred modern military aircraft, the outcome of which was a national tragedy. The Australian-made and manned Wirraways were shot from the sky or crash-landed with the loss of most of their crews. The planes had been directed to be built and equip the RAAF as fighters by Australian politicians. Traditionally, the defence of Australia was based largely on British goodwill, an arrangement which itself was collectively called imperial defence involving all the nations of the Empire collaborating on military matters. But imperial defence was little more than a name. Britain emerged from the First World War drained of much of its military strength and deep in debt. From this standpoint, during the twenty year interval between the World Wars, the British implied that the dominions were responsible for their own national defence, a situation generations of Australian politicians were reluctant to accept. The RAAF was formed after World War I but its exact role was never precisely defined. There was no doctrine produced by the government or its advisers to allow a concrete plan to be followed and aircraft procured to implement that plan in times of war. Therefore an ad hoc air force grew in disarray that could neither defend the nation from air attack nor sink capital ships if they threatened national security. The advent of potent monoplane aircraft overthrowing biplanes in the mid to late 1930s gave a new dimension to military warfare. For the poorly defended nation of Australia with its tiny population and large landmass, the warplane was a blessing ii and a curse. The invention of modern interceptors and dive-bombers by the major powers meant that any country could be attacked at any time by carrier-borne planes but also that they could defend themselves from a major aggressor without the necessity of a large navy; a method of defence known by the Chinese as ‘asymmetric’ employed successfully during the interwar years by several minor military powers. There were only two means of acquiring contemporary aircraft—build them locally or buy them combat-ready from a powerful ally with the infrastructure and technology to design and mass produce warplanes while administering a foreign policy of selling them to friendly nations. The Australian government decided on both courses despite having neither the inventiveness nor the aircraft industry to manufacture warplanes. It also lacked the expertise to select warplanes being made by major military powers needed for destroying capital ships and intercepting bombers under combat conditions. The failure of successive prime ministers (of which there were four) in the years immediately preceding World War II to understand the RAAF’s needs and equip it accordingly, particularly in the case of first-rate interceptors, appeared to amount to a national characteristic flaw. The result was a series of military and civilian disasters as well as the Rabaul fiasco including a mammoth Japanese air attack on Darwin of 19 February 1942 and on Broome of 3 March 1942 in which hundreds of Allied personnel and foreign civilians perished because of Australia’s lack of an adequate aerial defence system. This thesis shows that such an end result was not inevitable. Australian industry had the capacity to manufacture warplanes but not the necessary infrastructure. The process of establishing an aircraft industry was too protracted to meet the deteriorating international crisis following the rise of Nazism in Germany and Japanese aggression in the 1930s. The government’s obligation to protect its people independent of Anglo-Australian relationships and fear of the strength of a powerful adversary to overwhelm its defences produced a form of self-induced inertia. During the time under review there were more than enough indications that local industry and British aviation companies on which the government was reliant for the iii supply of aircraft, would not reach the RAAF in time for the unfolding international crisis. Yet only at the last minute did the government switch to the purchase of military planes from America despite an aggressive pre-Pearl Harbor drive by US aircraft companies to supply allies with outstanding warplanes under the generous terms of Lend-Lease. The realities of a ‘fighterless’ air force had many repercussions apart from needless deaths, fear of uncontested invasion and loss of independence. The government had to rely on American charity for survival and the stationing of US air force fighter units in regions of Australia under air attack that should have been protected by the RAAF. Political independence was lost to American military command as was the control of Australian forces. This thesis uncovers the political decisions that promoted not only the largely useless decisions that led to an air defence collapse of 1941–42 as soon as it came under fire but establishes clearly that the compilation of an air defence force that may have prevented the disasters this crisis created was always at hand. The fact that Australian air space was invaded for two years was an outcome of the decisions of politicians during the pre-war years and not the lack of prowess of RAAF aircrews. This thesis illustrates the air force the nation may have acquired if common sense, patriotism and knowledge of military aircraft had been pursued, learned and applied by the nation’s leaders and their advisers during the immediate pre-World War II years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Key Words ................................................................................................................... i Abstract ....................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ....................................................................................................... v Table of Figures ....................................................................................................... viii List of Abbreviations .............................................................................................. xix Statement of Original Authorship ......................................................................... xxi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. xxii Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................... 23 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 23 The need for modern fighter aircraft for the RAAF ......................................... 26 Examples of air war ignored ............................................................................. 27 Fighters and radar; a war-winning combination ............................................... 28 The interwar years of indecision ...................................................................... 32 British influence; British attitude ..................................................................... 35 Affection for the battleship ............................................................................... 37 The British neither help nor hinder ................................................................... 40 Britain makes promises it cannot keep ............................................................. 41 The Japanese invasion of China fails to interest anyone .................................. 43 Too little; too late ............................................................................................. 46 Hurricane interceptors were always available .................................................. 50 ‘He’s coming south’ ......................................................................................... 53 Obsessed with a home-grown air industry ....................................................... 56 Conclusion .......................................................................................................