Agree with much of what you say, CliSwe, but I’m not sure where you’re coming from:
Why should anyone question the effectiveness of such a successful stratagem?
Was the effectiveness of the strategem/tactics being questioned?
You are of course correct.
But it isn’t stretching a point too far to classify Australians and New Zealanders as “British” for the purposes of the thread, it being that by agreement between the Commonwealth heads of government the UK in general had overview and command of the available commonwealth forces, subject to certain logistical and supply review by the respective governments.
What often happened of course was that those same governments took to dealing with the “local” American command structures independant of the War Office in the UK. Plainly, this simplified tactical command and logistics matters.
Therefore, the loosely applied “British” nomen is forgivable, in the circumstances, imho.
Regards, Uyraell.
Australians were formally ‘British’ until our Citizenship Act of 1948 made us Australian citizens, but events during WWII had already separated us from Britain in many respects crucial to the conduct of the Pacific war.
Our forces in WWII always retained their independence when acting with Britain and our commanders took their orders from Australia, not Britain. British commanders in the Middle East had difficulty grasping this as they assumed that they automatically had soveriegnty over the colonials.
A lot of this goes back to WWI when, among other things, Australians objected to the British policy of shooting their own men for various offences and refused to submit themselves to the same regime.
We certainly weren’t under British command in our Pacific war, but voluntarily (more like desperately!) under American command under MacArthur.
Much of the Australian sentiment revolved around Churchill and others in the British government abandoning Australia to the advancing Japanese, at least as far as many in the Australian government and population saw it. This was in part a bit of vengeance or Schadenfreude by Churchill et al in retaliation for, as they saw it, Australia losing Malaya and Singapore to the Japanese, despite Australian forces being a minor part of the total British and Commonwealth force. The bitterness from the Australian side focuses on February 1942, shortly after Singapore surrendered, when Churchill unilaterally diverted our divisions returning from the Middle East (against British attempts to keep them there) to Burma. If they had gone to Burma they would have been lost, and Papua would have been lost to the Japanese later in 1942 as those troops, which were critical to repulsing the Japanese, would have been languishing as POWs of Japan, and we might well have been invaded. The war certainly would have progressed very differently for both sides.
All of this showed that our Prime Minister, John Curtin, was not unreasonable in abandoning Britain in preference for America in his famous words late in December 1941: “Without any inhibitions of any kind I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”
So, against that background and other matters which fractured the relationship between Australia and Britain, by the time MacArthur arrived in Australia in March 1942 there was no sentiment in the government leadership which would have allowed Britain to dictate to us on military or strategic matters in the war against Japan, which at that stage was the war to save Australia. It got worse when, around May 1942, Australia discovered by accident that Churchill and Roosevelt were pursuing their agreed ‘Germany first’ policy and that fighting Japan was not, relative to defeating Germany, a major strategic concern, and that in extreme circumstances Australia was expendable.
Britain was totally uninvolved in and irrelevant to the conduct of our Pacific war. Indeed, MacArthur encouraged Curtin to retrieve our remaining division from the British campaign in the Middle East, which duly occurred.
There is a very good treatment of these matters in several of David Day’s books http://users.bigpond.net.au/davidday/ , notably The Politics of War - Australia at War, 1939-45: From Churchill to Macarthur. David Horner http://rspas.anu.edu.au/people/personal/hornd_sdsc.php also covers these issues in various of his books, albeit perhaps more dispassionately than Day.
Did the Australians have different equipment than the rest of the British/Commonwealth forces (tanks, weapons, etc, not uniforms)
Generally no, apart from occasional local variations such as the Owen gun which evolved during the war.
Australian units might not have had the full range of British equipment as our army was much smaller and constrained by the Depression and other reasons for stingy defence spending, but they were based largely upon British equipment, as well as British tactics and organisation.
Relations with Australia have never really been the same again. particularly after we dumped the ‘Old’ [i.e. White] Commonwealth in favour of the European Common Market in the 1970s.
Not necessarily a bad thing.
It made Australians learn to be more independent as a nation, although our governments have tried to hitch our wagon to America as a substitute for Britain for defence purposes.
In the right, or more accurately wrong, war circumstances which I hope never eventuate, our government will discover that America will behave just as Britain did in WWII, and as any nation will, by looking exclusively to its own best interests and determining what happens to Australia on that basis.
Exactly as America did in WWII when, despite all the propaganda (still believed by a distressingly large proportion of my countrymen as the basis for their quaint belief that America will always save us in future) about fraternal bonds and coming to save us, the real reason was that it was in America’s strategic interests to preserve Australia as a base for its operations against Japan to win America’s war against Japan.
Care to elaborate?
In PNG Australian forces were equipped with matilda tanks.
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/popup/HuonSattel/%24file/016226.jpg%3FOpenElement&imgrefurl=http://ajrp.awm.gov.au/ajrp/remember.nsf/Web-Printer/DCC89A53B99FB911CA256CB80026E162%3FOpenDocument&usg=_cmDslGfWto7n-otmu1jYsgJLpw=&h=103&w=140&sz=13&hl=en&start=9&tbnid=hOiAOiDgkTu0CM:&tbnh=68&tbnw=93&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmatilda%2Btanks%2Bpapua%2Bnew%2Bguninea%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
elaborate in which direction? The Common Market, or relations with Australia?
[i]"particularly after we dumped the ‘Old’ Commonwealth"
Non-contendere’ : I agree with what you have put, and broadly speaking, NZ was in like case.
Likewise as “under command” situations: British officers in general didn’t understand that the respective Goverments maintained command over their own troops while broadly co-operating with the British forces, or American where such case applied.
Though I suspect we’re almost into an entirely “new” thread with this aspect of the discussion.
Regards, Uyraell.
Yeah, but not when it really mattered in 1942 on the Kokoda Track and elsewhere in 1942.
Nobody could have got a tank up on Kokoda.
The Japanese were very good at getting heavy MGs and mountain guns into action, and very quickly to capitalise on their advances, on Kokoda while the Australians lacked both.
The tide turned when the Japanese neared Moresby and the Australians got some 25 pdrs into action, against the odds by a great effort of dragging them up the mountains in various ways and configuratiosn. There is a great audio account of this by a gunner on the ABC but I can’t find it.
After reading this…
I was about to suggest this…
Nobody could have got a tank up on Kokoda.
But you saved me the effort. 
My wife accuses me of being effortless, but who cares what she thinks?
I don’t know much about Kiwi forces in WWII, except that they stayed in the Med and were heavily involved in Italy after Australia had withdrawn, and that General Freyberg, V.C., D.S.O. and three bars, among other awards, was a bloody good soldier in two world wars and a very effective commander in the second war.
I think that in general histories the Kiwis might be the most overlooked of all the Allied forces for their contribution, apart perhaps from the perpetually ignored Brazilians who also fought very well in Italy.
Yes, well, with me it’s always effortless. One size fits all, and if they complain they’re too tight, then I just stretch them a little.
Back on topic.
The lack of tank support was endemic throughout the allied southern hemisphere theatres in 1942.
The Argyles had local success in delaying the Japanese advance down the Malay peninsula, until confronted by japanese armour, which finished them off.
The Phillipines, the retreat through Burma, much the same story.
Canadian War Museum, Ottawa Has one or more In the US there are lots on most Bases also US Army bases in Germany
Cheers
Hi Guy’s
Big File but lots of Lee/Grants
Surviving M2 Medium, M3 Lee and M3 Grant tanks
M3 Lee – Canadian War Museum, Ottawa (Canada) … M3 Lee – Royal Australian
Armoured Corps Tank Museum Puckapunyal (Australia) …
the.shadock.free.fr/Surviving_Lee_Grant.pdf
Cheers
That’s a very pukka link.
Cheers, Marra