Red Sun At War Part Three: Fighting back from the Coral Sea to the Kokoda Trail.

By Nick Shepley

By early 1942 the Japanese appeared to be unstoppable. On land, sea and in the air they have devastated their European and American enemies and in the space of a few months built a vast empire in the Pacific and South East Asia. 1942 would be a year of desperate struggle for the Australians and Americans who defended the Marshall Islands and Papua, the only defences that Australia possessed against the encroaching enemy. This ebook tells the story of the dogged defence of Australia and the end of Japan's ambitions of permanent conquest, charting the end of her run of conquests and the start of a long defensive retreat that would end, three years later with total defeat.

This is the third part of a six ebook series on the Pacific War, but can also be read as a stand alone title. Explaining History ebooks take the often convoluted and complex narratives of war, strategy and combat and make them accessible for a wide readership without losing depth and analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Explaining History
• Release date: Dec 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780992704858

Nick Shepley

I'm the creator of this site and the Explaining History ebook series, I work as a writer, editor, teacher, publisher and history consultant for magazines, radio and television. If you're looking for advice for a book, website, tv or radio programme, you can contact me for a discussion here. I've lived in some rather unlikely places around the world, travelled across Siberia, wandered across Australia and been mercilessly conned by taxi drivers in Delhi and I'd like to think I've learned something from these experiences. When I can really distill whatever that learning is, and if it's more profound than anything a million other people have to say, I will share it with you all. I've been a journalist, a farm hand, a bookseller, a debt collector (which believe me, is nothing short of rank hypocrisy on my part) lecturer in history and pop culture, and most recently a good old fashioned high school teacher. My what an honour; there are actually few things more satisfying to the soul than to help someone to understand the world they've been born into a little better. The books I write are meant to be quick and easy to absorb guides to parts of history that are essential to our understanding of the world we're in today. They are meant to be a start to your journey, not the journey in itself, so if you're interested in one topic and want to know more, read on, or ask me and I'll send you recommendations for other writers and historians. If there's something you're interested in and I haven't covered it, drop me a line and I'll either write it or put you in touch with someone who can help.

Book preview

Red Sun At War Part Three:

Fighting back from the Coral Sea to the Kokoda Trail.

Nick Shepley

www.explaininghistory.com

Publisher Information

Red Sun At War Part Three published in 2013 by Explaining History.

www.explaininghistory.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding cover other than that which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent reader.

Copyright 2013 Nick Shepley.

The right of Nick Shepley to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Diary entries of Marine Jim Donahue are reproduced in this ebook by kind permission of the Donahue family.

Introduction

The end of 1941 and the first months of 1942 had seen the catastrophic collapse of a colonial society and civilisation that stretched from the tea plantations of Assam to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A Euro-American world of British, French, Dutch and American colonies had been devastated in under six months by Japan, owing to a combination of imperial over stretch, the pressure of fighting a European war against Germany (which the French and Dutch had already lost by 1940) and a continual under-estimation of what Japan was capable of achieving. The Japanese Empire by February 1942 had extended as far as the Timor Sea and her bombers were within range of the Australian continent, raising Australian fears that they faced an invasion. The Japanese were anxious to close off the sea lanes to Australia and to bomb her ports and naval installations to prevent the continent from becoming a launchpad for an American counter offensive across the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur, who had ignominously fled the island of Corregidor and left his forces to the tender mercies of the Japanese on the Bataan Peninsula had established himself in Australia along with the remnants of the ABDA (American, British, Dutch, Australian) Command, which was dissolved and replaced with a new command structure for the South West Pacific, with MacArthur as Supreme Commander. This ebook picks up from where Red Sun At War Part Two left off, following the collapse of Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies and it follows the struggle of allied powers to stop the advance of Japan and to come to terms with the new rules of fighting that needed to be adopted in order to defeat them. The harsh, uncompromising terrain of the Pacific Islands and the new complexities of aircraft carrier warfare were mastered surprisingly quickly by the Americans and their allies, and the result was that by early 1943 the once unquestioned supremacy that the Japanese enjoyed across the Pacific was no longer a reality. A stalemate in the Battle of the Coral Sea and a devastating defeat at Midway meant that future Japanese plans for further conquest had to be speeded up and others shelved, and the possibility of real defeat, always present since the failure to destroy the aircraft carriers of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour, became more and more a reality as 1942 ended and 1943 began.

Part One: Australia.

The fall of Singapore probably did more to damage Anglo-Australian relations than any one event in the 20th Century, perhaps even more so than the First World War disaster at Gallipoli when over eight thousand Australian troops were lost in the doomed campaign. The magnitude of the disaster was vastly greater, with 15,000 prisoners being taken, many, from the Australian 8th Division, had arrived to defend the island days before the inept General Arthur Percival surrendered it to the Japanese. In total some 80,000 allied prisoners were sent to work in horrific slave labour conditions in Thailand, Burma and in Japan itself. The Australian Government reflected considerable public anger towards Britain, and also a sense that Singapore had been part of the wider defences of Australia  and the continent was exceedingly vulnerable following its collapse. Already, before the fall in December 1941 Prime Minister John Curtin made it clear where his trust lay:

The Australian Government...regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies' fighting plan. Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

Australia was no different from the rest of the British Empire after 1929, it had seen huge defence cut backs as a result of the Great Depression. The existence of a major new maritime power in the Pacific, Japan, led inevitably to a sense of anxiety and concern in the Australian press and a vigorous debate about the country’s defence priorities and options. The shadow of the First World War, which saw the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) deployed to the western front, Egypt, Palestine and most fatefully the disaster in the Dardanelles, also brought about no small amount of desire in Australia for an end to involvement in European wars. The various slaughters and disasters of the First World War that left an entire generation of young Australian men dead or maimed and broken had served to inculcate a deep sense of resentment for Britain and her imperial ventures. Moreover, the image of the effete, aristocratic and incompetent British general was deeply ingrained as a result of the war, particularly from the dispatches sent from London by Sydney Sun journalist Keith Murdoch, regarding the fiasco he had witnessed at Anzac Cove at Gallipoli:

"The conceit and self complacency of the red feather men are equalled only by their incapacity. Along the line of communications, especially at Moudros, are countless high officers and conceited young cubs who are plainly only playing at war. ...appointments to the general staff are made from motives of friendship and social influence."

In September 1939 the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies travelled to Britain, concerned that the crisis over Poland did not draw attention away from Australia’s shaky defences. Already, he had expressed concern over the Singapore Plan to defend the eastern portion of the British Empire and he knew that Japan was waiting for the opportunity that a general European war presented in order to expand south and westwards. Menzies, a committed anti-communist, along with a host of western politicians and diplomats had previously been prepared to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt and said as much during the 1938 Munich crisis. At the time he was serving as the Attorney General in the appeasement inclined cabinet of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, a government that was largely in step with the appeasement inclined administration of Neville Chamberlain. He was sworn in as Prime Minister in April 1939, following the death of Lyons and in September took the country to war when Britain declared war on Germany. It was evident in both Britain and Australia that the policy of appeasement had been a failure, but it was highly unlikely, given the bitter legacy of the First World War that Australian Divisions would join the British Expeditionary Force in France. In much the same tone as his defeated and exhausted British counterpart, Menzies made a solemn announcement to the Australian people on September 3rd:

Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.

Menzies had emerged weakened from an ugly power struggle for control of the ruling United Australia Party, where his chief rival, Earle Page, openly accused him of cowardice due to his lack of war service in the First World War. Page had been appointed as an interim Prime Minister following Lyons’ death, but was ousted when Menzies was elected party leader and therefore Prime Minister. The allegations stuck, however, and a country of less than ten million that felt increasingly isolated and vulnerable and cut off from the rest of the world instinctively had little faith in him as a war leader. Whilst there were some Australians who failed to see why a second experience of bloody warfare in Europe and the Middle East was any of their concern, Menzies was acutely aware of Australia’s vulnerability. If Britain was invaded by Germany or otherwise eliminated as a result of the war, the entire shaky system of imperial defences that the country was reliant on would collapse. Backing Britain to the hilt and committing men to the bolster the Middle East, defending the Suez Canal which connected Britain to her empire was initially Australia’s most essential defence task. In his speech to the Australian people, the Prime Minister said:

Great Britain and France, with the cooperation of the British Dominions, have struggled to avoid this tragedy. They have, as I firmly believe, been patient. They have kept the door of negotiation open. They have given no cause for aggression. But in the result, their efforts have failed, and we are therefore as a great family of nations involved in a struggle which we must at all costs win, and which we believe in our hearts, we will win.

Australia began the war with virtually no army, navy or airforce to speak of, there were three thousand regular troops and a further eighty thousand reservists. The Royal Australian Navy was just fifteen ships strong, most of which were obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities. Menzies ordered the creation of the 2nd Australian Imperial Force and introduced conscription on January 1st 1940. Controversially the AIF was to be an expeditionary force, one which would see Australia’s only full strength division, the 6th, go overseas, to the Middle East or Europe. Conscription had been announced in November 1939, but it wasn’t until Britain’s disaster at Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 and the subsequent collapse of France that the numbers of men under arms in Australia dramatically grew. By the summer of 1940 there were nearly 50,000 men, enough for a Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Division, and the new Australian Army was to be led by an controversial figure from the First World War, admired by his contemporaries for his planning and organisational ability, but little else besides. Sir Thomas Blamey, a general who had proved pivotal in developing the strategy of the final Hundred Days Campaign that forced the German Army into a rout in Northern France was appointed the overall commander of the 6th Division and then the Commander of Ist Corps AIF. Blamey would become the first Field Marshal in Australian military history, but in 1940, he was a curious choice, he lacked the reputation of greater warrior generals that could help to bolster the confidence of the Australian public, but older generations would have been familiar with his name from dispatches from the Western Front in the previous war. Blamey was an alumni of the the British Staff College at Quetta in India and had been a career soldier long before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, he was in England in July during the countdown to war and was promoted to the rank of Major just days before the British joined the conflict. He initially worked as an intelligence officer for Lord Kitchener until he was attached to the newly created first Australian Imperial Force in Egypt. He arrived in Egypt in November 1914 and by the following April was a general staff officer at Gallipoli, landing at Anzac Cove on the 25th. He was mentioned in dispatches after fighting off a Turkish patrol whilst on reconnaissance and was key in the development of the periscope rifle, an innovation that allowed snipers to fire over the trench without being exposed. Following the eventual acceptance in Whitehall that the entire campaign had been a costly failure, the British, French and Australian expeditionary force was eventually evacuated from the beaches and Blamey and the 1st AIF were redeployed to the Western Front. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for planning the offensive that led to the seizure of Pozières during the Battle of the Somme. For the Welsh Divisions, Mametz Wood came to define their Somme experience, the Australian battle was at Pozières. The Australian 1st and 9th Divisions and the British 48th attacked and held the town against German counter attacks over a two week period, and the Australians alone suffered 23,000 casualties. In 1918 Blamey was staff officer to General Sir John Monash, who’s