Australia

Constituting the world's smallest continent, Australia is a vast country that lies between the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the Southern Hemisphere. During World War II, its location was of supreme strategic importance, with the Netherlands East Indies and New Guinea directly to the north, and the Coral Sea Islands to the northeast. The Japanese eyed Australia as the greatest of Asian-Pacific prizes and believed that its conquest would certainly force the British and Americans into negotiating a favorable peace. Australia was a member of the British Commonwealth and was vigorous not only in its own defense, but in that of the entire Commonwealth. Royal Australian Air Force pilots flew in the The sign over the entrance to Auschwitz proclaims: WORK MAKES YOU FREE. (National Holocaust Museum) 136 Australia Battle of Britain, and the Royal Australian Navy contributed ships and personnel to the Mediterranean campaign during 1940–41, where they were instrumental in the victory at the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941. Australian troops were sent into the North African Campaign and fought in Greece and Crete. At its peak, Australia mobilized 680,000 troops, and its modest industrial infrastructure geared up to produce both aircraft and munitions. However, once the Pacific war began with the attack on the United States at the Battle of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the thrust of Australian strategy immediately shifted to defense of the suddenly imperiled homeland. Not only did 15,000 Australians instantly become prisoners of war (POWs) in the Fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942, but the city of Darwin, Australia, was bombed on February 19, and the Japanese, rolling up conquest after conquest, bore down on Port Moresby, New Guinea, stepping stone to a fullscale invasion of Australia. At this point, the principal Allied force in the Pacific, the United States, became Australia's major ally. Indeed, wartime alignment with America signaled a growing independence from Great Britain, and when Australian troops were recalled from the Middle East, Australian prime minister John Curtin defied British prime minister Winston Churchill by committing the troops to the defense of Australia rather than dispatching them to Burma. On the U.S. side, it was to Australia that General Douglas MacArthur traveled after his evacuation from the Philippines, and he established his first headquarters as supreme allied commander in Melbourne and then in Brisbane. MacArthur was only the highest ranking of the many U.S. service personnel who poured into Australia. So many came that the Australian government created a Civil Construction Corps (CCC) as part of an Allied Works Council. Staffed by 53,500 men by 1943, the CCC built facilities for the American troops. Those too old to serve in the Australian armed forces, men aged 45 to 60, were liable to conscription into the CCC (some 16,000 CCC members were conscripts). The government also set up a Department of War Organization of Industry to regulate industrial production and assure that war materiel was always given top priority. Various civilian goods were subject to strict rationing, including tea, sugar, alcoholic beverages, tires, and gasoline. Strong legislation was enacted to combat incipient black marketeering. As U.S. forces continued to build up in Australia, the government was compelled to take the extraordinary step of releasing some 30,000 men from the army and 15,000 from the air force to serve as laborers to assist the CCC in necessary construction, including extensive building of port facilities. Even this drastic step left a shortage of laborers, and more than 10,000 Italian prisoners of war (POWs) were put to work on Australian farms and elsewhere. In 1942, the Australian Women's Land Army was created, which sent some 2,000 women into the agricultural workforce. Another important home front institution were civil defense and other ad hoc defense forces. The Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC) was initially composed of World War I veterans but soon took anyone who wished to serve as airfield defenders and coast watchers. The VDC guarded key homeland facilities, provided some counterespionage intelligence, and, after training, manned antiaircraft defenses. By 1944, the VDC consisted of about 100,000, and the duties they performed freed up thousands of military personnel for frontline service. Civil defense included an extensive blackout policy, which was enforced by Air Raid Precaution (ARP) wardens. In the days when invasion loomed, much discussion was devoted to plans for evacuation from the cities. However, it was ultimately decided that people occupying and (as best they could) defending their own homes provided the most effective protection. A program of air raid shelter construction was instituted in major population centers. The Australian armed forces are treated in detail in Australia, Air Force of; Australia, Army of; and Australia, Navy of. In general, these services fought alongside the Americans. The Royal Australian Navy participated in the important Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942. General Douglas Australia 137 MacArthur prevailed upon Australian high command to abandon the idea of girding for a defensive war on the Australian homeland and instead take the offensive by fighting the Japanese in New Guinea. Thus, the Australian army was largely responsible for the Allied victory at Milne Bay, New Guinea, during August and September 1942, which marked the first step in the Allied seizure of the initiative on land against the hitherto triumphant Japanese. Australian troops were also instrumental in the long drive against the Japanese in southern New Guinea, forcing them back over the Kokoda Trail, a jungle track across the formidable Owen Stanley Mountains. While Australian troops engaged in a war of attrition against the Japanese throughout New Guinea, they played a decidedly subordinate role to American forces elsewhere. Of the 680,000 men who served in the armed forces of Australia during World War II, 37,467 died (this included 23,365 battle deaths), and 39,803 were wounded. It was a heavy toll, but MacArthur's policy of offense, his insistence that the Australians bring the war to the Japanese in New Guinea rather than wait for an invasion of Australia, surely saved the Australian nation untold suffering. Apart from the loss of military personnel, Australia emerged from the war largely unscathed and, indeed, with a renewed nationalism, sense of achievement, and enhanced sense of independence from Britain.