Australian pilots were needlessly wasted on missions of no tactical benefit to Australia. The last months of the war saw these young pilots assigned to an inferior role shooting up enemy positions on odd islands of no strategic importance bypassed during the American advance. Many were shot down by anti-aircraft fire or crash landed when they ran out of fuel. Eager to participate in the real war further north, which was ‘OUT OF BOUNDS’ to Australians, they felt ‘left out’ of the really important operations that were being fought to bring the war to a speedy end. These pilots gave their lives in the backwaters to feed the ego of General Douglas MacArthur who had no intention of bestowing laurels on the brows of anyone but himself and his own men. In spite of his promise that Australian troops would be integral to the liberation of the Philippines, his fanatical determination to re-capture his former home, alone and without the help of his allies, caused great indignation and bitterness within the ranks of Australian Air Force Squadrons.
The campaigns, in which Australians replaced US troops needed in MacArthur’s campaign against the Philippines, i.e. New Britain, Bouganville, Tarakan, Brunai Bay and Balikpapan, made no difference to the outcome of the war or the time it took to bring the Pacific war to a close. The capture of the airfield at Balikpapan for instance, cost 229 Australian lives but could not be repaired before the end of the war. At Brunei Bay, 114 Australians died for what was planned to be a British naval anchorage but it was never used. At Tarakan, 225 men of the 26th Brigade of the Australian 9th Division, died in a campaign that lasted 52 days. With the end of active hostilities, the troops were left wondering what it was all about. The capture of the island had not shortened the war by even one day. The campaign had no military or strategic value, some officers described the effort as ‘a complete waste of time’.
The issue was wider than that and covered Australian operations in the SWPA from 1944 onwards. In some places it led troops close to mutiny.
We had several battle ready divisions doing nothing but cooling their heels in Australia during part of that time when they could have been better employed assisting American operations eastwards [EDIT: WESTWARDS - I am an idiot!] of New Guinea.
As you say, it was because Mac wanted all the glory for himself and American forces.
There is a very good treatment of it in Peter Charlton’s The Unnecessary War: Island Campaigns of the South West Pacific 1944-45, MacMillan, Melbourne, 1983
In fairness to Mac, I should add that (as with some other issues involving shabby treatment of Australian troops and commanders in the SWPA) there was another aspect to the problem, being the Australian military commander, Gen Thomas Blamey.
As Australians relieved American units in various places in the islands in 1944 to release American troops for Mac’s island advance, Blamey put the Australians on a more aggressive footing than the Americans had been in what were often undeclared truces between the Japanese and the Americans. This caused a lot of resentment in some Australian units as the troops knew that the Japanese were isolated and content to continue, as they had been when facing the American units, to tend their market gardens without any offensive action against the Australians. Some Australian troops recognised that any action they took against the marooned Japanese land forces at the eastern end of the Japanese ribbon defence would not have any impact on Japan’s eventual defeat and that any casualties they suffered would be pointless.
The problem was well known in senior Australian military and political circles at the time and resulted in Blamey being challenged, I think by a government minister but perhaps by someone in the military line above him, about needless operations. His reply, which I can’t recall verbatim, was along the lines that it was a novel proposition that properly tranined and equipped troops should not seek out the enemy and destroy him at every opportunity. There was also adverse Australian press comment on the issue at the time.
Looks like Australia got a bum-steer in the Big one. Considering the vast amount of soldiers the government gave and the interest and the determination, you would think they would have been given a more active role.Still, Australia lost close to 40,000 lives and thats a noble sacrifice.
We had an active, and successful, role when it mattered most in the SWPA land war, in 1942, when Mac’s American troops, through no fault of their own, didn’t. And he never got over it, the arrogant and vindictive prick he was.
Australian troops’ successes kept Mac in the war in the second half of 1942 when he was, rightly, very worried that he might be replaced or have his command moved to the USN because of concerns in Washington about his leadership and competence, and competition from the USN for his command. And then he could never have done his big “I have returned” performance.
He was a competent (and contrary to the Dugout Doug epithet, personally very brave) but popularly overrated commander in the later part of the war when success came his way, largely because of the significant resources allocated to him by higher American command for his campaigns.
He was a publicly inspiring commander in 1942 when he and the Australian government had serious concerns about his and Australia’s ability to resist the Japanese. That was good leadership and it counts for a lot in winning wars.
He was a lousy operational commander in the Philippines 1941-42 and not much better in his subsequent period in Australia in 1942 - early 1943.
He was at all times a great self-promoting publicist, who would have been a brilliant commander if he’d been half as good militarily as his self-promoting publicity skills.
As for ‘the vast amount of of soldiers the government gave and the interest and the determination’ of Australians, you should read about government and military concerns even in early to mid 1942 as Japan was on our doorstep about some Australians continuing to live as if there was no threat to their existence. Blamey rightly criticised civilians for their complacency and ended up being pilloried by elements of the press for it.
Australia saved itself on land from direct attacks towards its mainland by Japan in Papua and pushed Japan back, but from a strategic viewpoint we were saved by the USN in the Battle of the Coral Sea (with some very useful RAN involvement) and especially by the USN in the Battle of Midway which deprived Japan of the critical naval ability to prosecute its war in the wider Pacific.
Moreover, without the American successes in Guadalcanal about the same time that Australia was succeeding in Papua, with very useful American support at Buna and in the air and on the sea during the Papuan campaign, the Japanese would not have decided to abandon their thrust towards Australia through Port Moresby. However, Guadalcanal was outside Mac’s SWPA command but it made a bigger contribution in strategic terms to Japan’s decision not to reinforce the advance to Moresby than anything Mac and his American forces in Papua, as distinct from the Australians on Kokoda and at Milne Bay, did.
I think one of the more spectacularly misleading and self-promoting press releases from Mac’s spin doctors, was the announcement (to the US domestic press) that the General had advanced his HQ “1000 miles closer to the front line.” He had, of course, moved from Melbourne to Brisbane.
Cheers,
Cliff
Which put him only about 1,500 miles away from the front line, although he didn’t expect that front line to develop at the time he moved.
On 20 July, seemingly convinced that the invasion threat had dissipated and the war was moving towards an offensive stage, MacArthur shifted his headquarters from the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne to Brisbane. He and most of his staff took up quarters in Lennon’s Hotel while working from the eighth floor of the city’s largest office building, the AMP building, on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets: most days MacArthur would visit his family at the hotel for lunch.33 Earlier in the month MacArthur had proposed to the Chiefs of Staff that there be an immediate offensive to recapture Rabaul, the islands of New Britain and New Ireland, and then proceed northwards but the Chiefs of Staff gave priority to areas further east including the Solomons.
In any case, on the very day after MacArthur reached Brisbane, the Japanese landed troops at Buna and Gona on the north coast of New Guinea thereby thwarting MacArthur’s plans to establish his own bases there for an assault on Rabaul. Even at this stage MacArthur and the Australian military leaders still seem to have failed to appreciate that the Japanese were planning to attack Port Moresby across the Owen Stanley Range via the Kokoda Track.34 This view quickly changed as the Japanese advanced against light resistance and on 29 July captured the important airfield at Kokoda.
http://john.curtin.edu.au/macarthur/essay2.html
Mac’s control of the press for self-promotion purposes deserves respect for its efficiency and effectiveness, and contempt for its ruthlessness and deceit.
It wasn’t just the Aussies that got the short end of the stick somethimes. the U.S. Army and USMC suffered aroung 10,000 casulties (roughly 2,000 KIA) capturing Peleliu for no military gain what so ever.
I can’t beleive it!..I just read that Australia wanted to Annex Japan after the War!..Could this be true?!
"As the war drew to an end, Australia’s Labor Government fretted ceaselessly about grabbing as much territory as possible. At one point, foreign minister Evatt suggested that Australia and New Zealand should control half the Pacific; the US Ambassador in Canberra for his part believed Evatt wanted ‘sovereignty over all Solomons, Hebridges, and Fiji groups’, and planned to ‘bargain for Australian ownership or domination up to the equator.’ (Bell 1973: 15, 19-20) Canberra cabled the British proposing to take responsibility for ‘policing’ East Timor, New Guina and the Solomons and ‘share in policing’ large sections of Indonesia as well as the New Hebrides. (Wood 1993: 16)
But to bargain effectively you had to be at the table. In his official war history Paul Hasluck notes that around mid-1943 there arose “the new idea that the war effort was an admission ticket to a peace conference.” (Hasluck v2,: 302) By 1945 getting a ticket had become a consuming passion. Chifley reiterated on 27 July that ‘the basic political objective of the Australian government with regard to the postwar period was to secure a place and a voice in the peace settlement.’ (Quoted in Wood 1993: 11) How to achieve this when the Aussies had been relegated to a bit part in the closing stages of the war, mopping up areas the Americans had left behind in their island-hopping strategy?
The Advisory War Council reported ‘criticism that the liquidation of bypassed areas was not by itself a worthy effort for Australian forces’, but there was more than pride at stake: ‘from the aspect of prestige and participation in the peace settlement and control machinery it would be of great importance to be associated with the drive to defeat Japan. (Wood 1998: 9-10) The trouble was that Australia’s front-line role was minimal. Meanwhile Britain and Portugal maddeningly brushed aside Canberra’s ambitions in Indonesia and East Timor .
All the more important, then, that Australia share in occupying Japan. This would get Canberra to the table with the big players, and at the same time help ensure a wretched fate for the hated yellow-skinned imperialist rival. ‘Australia’s very life’, Evatt insisted, ‘depends on a just and severe settlement with Japan’. It would be severe all right. The Labor Party had grown up as the quintessential party of Australian nationalism, which in turn was inseparable from White Australia and from paranoia about the Yellow Peril. It was now very determined to crush Japanese aspirations, even at the cost of a long and costly occupation. (Bates 1993: 111 for the quote- my emphasis; Waters 1995: 37-38.)
No.
Where does this come from?
It’s a transparently stupid farrago of fact and opinion of a particular slant, which sounds like 1940s - 1950s communist analysis of WWII and its consequences dressed up with later ‘research’ by more recent communist commentators pursuing a historical analysis based on highly selective ‘facts’.
It’s the sort of ridiculously broad and ultimatley meaningless and historically inaccurate shit I’d expect from Socialist Alternative or some other bunch of Marxist dinosaurs / anti-capitalists / environmentalists / anti-everything fuckwits who base their lives on running thrilling lectures, attended by three bewildered people and a crippled dog, about why the war in Iraq is the last nail in the coffin of imperialist capitalism. If only someone had told the Iraqis that!
Well I didn’t write it. I wasn’t sure if it was legit or not, but I knew you would know the answer if I posted it, so I guess it’s not true then?.
One point you are missing DD. That Australia could not aford to lose any airmen or soildiers for no reason at all including giving Britain some support.
Meanwhile America with a huge population could aford to lose a couple of thousands of airmen and soildiers.
Since America join the war in 1942, 3 years after ww2 started America, i don’t think America would of suffered by losing 10,000 soildiers,while Australia join ww2 in 1939 with hardly no army at all,Australia by losing 10’000 soildiers would of sufferd badly.
Regrads AV
Australia could have absorbed casualties at that level in the second half of 1944 at the time of Peleliu. We had 100,000 battle ready soldiers sitting around doing nothing in Australia in 1944 because MacArthur didn’t want them involved in his grand advance to the Philippines. Moreover, in 1944 we also released about the same number of men from the armed services to return to war production as there was nothing for them to do in the services. Our soldiers were subsequently used in landings at least as controversially useless as Peliliu and in other equally controversially useless and costly operations of no strategic value, although this was attributable to Australian rather than American decisions.
I see you’re point has value. I believe myself Australia could not afford to lose any amount of soildiers,Menzie the Aussie P/M at the time was trying to get Aussie soildiers back from defending europe too defend our own front door cause of the lack of Aussie soildiers,this is telling me that Australia really could not afford to lose any valable Aussie Soildiers.
Menzies, a conservative Anglophile prime minister, never tried to get any soldiers back from Britain.
Australian soldiers were not defending Europe except to the extent that their actions in the Middle East contributed to that defence, apart from a disastrous campaign in Greece and later Crete as a consequence of another of Churchill’s strategic and military brainwaves.
John Curtin, a Labor primer minister on the other side of politics to Menzies, became prime minister after Menzies resigned several months before Japan started its war. Curtin remained prime minister until he died about a month before Japan surrendered. It was he who stood up to Churchill and brought the 6th and 7th Divisions back from the Middle East to meet the Japanese threat in 1942, and later the 9th Division.
Australia’s problem in 1942 was not so much the number of soldiers but deficiencies in their equipment (e.g. a shortage of rifles because we had sent 20,000 .303s - enough to equip a division - from our small stock to Britain early in the war to aid its defence), training and leadership. This was largely resolved durng the second half of 1942 and into 1943. So far as bringing the troops back from the Middle East is concerned, their numbers were important but what was a lot more important was that they were battle hardened, which the forces then in Australia were not. The value of battle-hardened leadership was shown by 2nd AIF officers and NCO’s from the Middle East being distributed among the green militia forces during the Kokoda campaign and by the 2nd AIF units which repelled the Japanese at Milne Bay.
A further problem was that the huge size of the country and its coastline placed impossible demands on the military trying to defend it with an army raised from about six million people. As American forces built up here and as Japan was repelled during 1943 this became less of an issue and enabled more forces to be deployed to aggressive action against Japan, primarily in Papua New Guinea where Australia bore the brunt of the grinding war of attrition in 1943 and early 1944 while MacArthur marshalled his American forces for his thrust to the Philippines, after which Mac sidelined Australian forces.
No nation can afford to lose any soldiers in any war, but they all do. Australian soldiers were not a special case. We could have lost a lot more than we did and still have survived. We were lucky that we did not undertake the type of large amphibious landings the Americans did in the Pacific against heavily fortified Japanese positions, or we would have lost a lot more men. Then again, the Americans were lucky that they did not undertake the aggressive actions we took in backwaters against the Japanese or they would have lost a lot more men.
Well not to say your opinion is wrong but there are other options that are just as plausible. Maybe the Australian government was trying to save face. Australian troops were busy fighting Germany in Europe while the US Navy was playing a major role defending the islands around Australia from the Japanese. I am sure that alone enticed the Australian government to want its own troops back in the region to dispel the impression that Australia needed some other country to defend it from the Japanese. Or there are plenty of other reasons, any one of which could be right.
As for absorbing losses, the U.S. may have had a much larger fighting force so therefore been able to sustain higher casualties, but the examples used in the starting of this thread were of a few hundred Australian casualties. Not to belittle their sacrifice, but the loss of a few hundred in multiple battles is substantially lower than thousands of U.S. troops in one battle alone. And the original purpose of my post was simply to point out that it wasn’t just Australian troops that were needlessly sacrificed in the Pacific Theater.
Crap! I was too slow typing again…:neutral:
No, the Australian government was trying to get troops back to save us while Churchill was trying to divert them to Burma, where they would have been lost, after which we would have lost in New Guinea and Japan would have taken Port Moresby and quite probably carried out the IJN’s intention to invade mainland Australia.
No, Australian troops never fought in Europe, apart from a brief campaign in Greece, and that was finished well before Pearl Harbor.
Australian troops fought Japan on land in Papua during the same period that American troops fought them on Guadalcanal, with the same ultimate success.
The USN was certainly critical in defending Australia during the Battle of the Coral Sea, which stopped Japan’s first attempt at taking Port Moresby which would have been the pivot for an invasion of mainland Australia.
No, we needed them because Churchill and Roosevelt were pursuing their ‘Germany first’ policy and were not prepared to divert significant forces to the defence of Australia, although by then it was clear that Britain could not and would not be able to send any land or air forces and bugger all naval forces to our aid if Japan invaded us, despite Churchill promising to do so as he promised many things to us during that time which never eventuated.
We were fighting for our survival as Japan encircled us and tried to cut us off from America to prevent America using us as a base against Japan. America never experienced anything remotely like that attack or threat. We weren’t trying to dispel impressions but trying to survive.
Only by a minute. 
I am quickly learning on the forum side here one must be very specific.
I was still referring to 1944 as was previously mentioned when I talked of troops being in Europe which I intended to include the Mediterranean Theater. By ’44 Australia wasn’t really fighting for its life as it was earlier in the war. But you did prove one thing…there are many plausible explanations though your option sounds better…
A little of topic but being an Aussie I figure you’re a good one to ask. When referring to Australia is it just referred to as ‘it’s life’ or ‘her life’?