varjag wrote: Australias extensive involvement in 'the Pacific War'.....I'll probably make a lot of enemies by saying it - but apart from some tenacious action that halted the Japanese in New Guinea, it was a non-event. So was the British 'help' in 1945. The Pacific war, was a US show to 99,5 %.
The facts contradict Varjag’s quoted statement and his subsequent posts in support of it. The facts also contradict Dr Peter Stanley’s criticisms in his papers of Australia‘s delusions about its contribution to WWII in general and to the defeat of Japan in particular.
[My comments ignore America’s crucial contribution outside the SWPA as Australia did not fight on land outside the SWPA in Pacific War operations. My comments are confined to a rebuttal of Varjag’s, and Dr Stanley’s, opinions that Australia’s contribution was negligible and wholly unimportant and that America’s operations were all that mattered in defeating Japan .]
Australia made an important contribution to the Pacific War and to the defeat of Japan, both by itself and in combined actions with American forces.
One example, in a larger and principally American engagement, is the blocking of the Japanese invasion force bound for Port Moresby by a task force under Australian command of two Australian cruisers, one American cruiser and two American destroyers during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Another example is the essentially Australian victory in Papua which forced the Japanese back from the outer perimeter of Port Moresby to the north coast.
Had the Japanese succeeded in taking Port Moresby by sea or land, it would have given Japan an arc of air and naval power reaching deep into Australia and surrounding waters which would have dramatically altered the course of the war, even if Japan did not attempt a landing on the Australian mainland. Depending on Japanese successes to Australia‘s north east and east, which would have played out differently if Japan controlled Moresby, Japan could readily have achieved its aim of isolating Australia and ultimately defeating it. This would have precluded Australia being the geographically and strategically ideal base for training, supplying and embarking Allied troops for the sustained 1942-45 thrust against Japan from the south, as well as producing other adverse consequences for the Allies, such as denying Britain some of its food supply and requiring America to feed and supply the American troops who were fed and supplied in Australia. Depending on the extent that Australia denied resources to the enemy, Japan could also have acquired very useful food production and industrial capacity.
Another example of Australia’s contribution is Australian-American operations in Papua and New Guinea, which forced the Japanese westwards and inland, giving MacArthur the west New Guinea coast springboard needed for his invasion of the Philippines in late 1944.
Another example is that:
“For the first two years of operations Australian troops formed the bulk of the forces fighting in the South-West Pacific Area. Indeed, at no stage did the proportion of Australians involved drop below 65%. “
Charlton, Peter, The Unnecessary War: Island Campaigns in the South-West Pacific 1944-45, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983, 11 [no internet text].
Providing at least 65% of the fighting troops for more than half the war in the SWPA is considerably more than the negligible .5% {half of 1%) contribution Varjag asserts Australia made in total to the defeat of Japan. Without Australia’s major and sustained contribution in the first two years of the war, the Japanese would not have been neutralised in New Guinea. MacArthur would not have been able to re-conquer the Philippines without a much more difficult assault and with much greater losses, and probably not at all. Japan would have had little incentive to surrender while still in control of its valuable conquests between Hanoi and Port Moresby.
If Varjag thinks that Australia doing 65% of the land fighting that enabled MacArthur to return to the Philippines doesn’t count, then it follows that the other 35% done by the Americans in those two years counts for a lot less and that until late 1944 American land forces in the SWPA contributed absolutely nothing to the defeat of Japan. The Americans who fought there and the loved ones of those who died there would undoubtedly find this just as insulting, and uninformed, as Australians do. Despite Varjag’s confident assertions, all the recognised American military analysts and historians concluded that the New Guinea campaign was an important step in the defeat of Japan and that Australia’s efforts in New Guinea made an important contribution to Japan‘s defeat. For example, the U.S. Army Center of Military History summary is:
“The New Guinea Campaign is really the story of two Allied armies fighting two kinds of war--one of grinding attrition and one of classic maneuver. During the attrition period, from January 1943 until January 1944, Australian infantrymen carried the bulk of ground combat while the Americans reconstituted, reinforced, and readied themselves for the maneuver phase of the campaign. During attrition warfare characteristic of eastern New Guinea ground operations through the seizure of the Saidor in January 1944, the Allies suffered more than 24,000 battle casualties; about 70 percent (17,107) were Australians. All this to advance the front line 300 miles in 20 months. But following the decisive Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea, envelopment in April 1944, losses were 9,500 battle casualties, mainly American, to leap 1,300 miles in just 100 days and complete the reconquest of the great island.
The series of breathtaking landings, often within a few weeks of one another, were the fruits of the Australians' gallant effort in eastern New Guinea. They fought the Japanese to a standstill at Wau and then pushed a fanatical foe back to the Huon Peninsula. This gave Sixth Army the time to train and to prepare American forces for the amphibious assaults that MacArthur envisioned. It also bought the time to bring the industrial capacity of America to bear in the Southwest Pacific. Aircraft, ships, landing craft, ammunition, medicine, equipment--in short, the sinews of war--gradually found their way to MacArthur's fighting men.”
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA ... index.html pp. 29-30
Similarly, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that:
“The completion of the New Guinea campaign marked the successful execution of the primary mission of the Southwest Pacific Forces, which was to extend control to the westward and establish bases from which the Allies could launch attacks against, first the Philippines, then Formosa, and finally the Japanese mainland.”
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USS ... PTO-8.html p. 185
Australian land forces clearly made an important contribution to the SWPA mission of attacking the Japanese home islands.
To the extent of their resources, the Australian air and naval forces also made an equally sustained and important contribution in the SWPA, and elsewhere in the war against Japan, during and after the first two years of the war. The contribution of other nations with much smaller forces, such as Dutch aviators and submariners, must also be acknowledged as making the best contribution their nations could in the circumstances.
The absence of Australian land forces from the Philippines and the final drive on the Japanese home islands, which is attributable primarily to MacArthur’s personal ambitions and vanity, does not diminish Australia’s contribution to Japan’s defeat. Asserting, as Varjag does, that Australia’s contribution to the Pacific War and to Japan’s defeat was virtually nothing is as illogical as saying that a bowler (pitcher in baseball for Americans, but after that I have no idea how the comparison goes) who took the first couple of wickets made no contribution to his team’s victory because he was fielding on the boundary as ordered by his captain (MacArthur) when the final wickets were taken by others.
The defeat of Japan was a long process which required numerous building blocks, inside and outside the Pacific and not necessarily involving conflict with Japanese forces (e.g. partial breaking of Japanese codes; development of the atom bomb; America‘s ability to build naval and merchant ships faster than Japan could sink them while the Allies, primarily the Americans, were sinking Japanese naval and merchant ships faster than Japan could build them; denying Japan the use of resources in conquered territories - the use of which was the primary purpose of Japan’s military conquests - by sinking Japan’s merchant shipping; and bringing America‘s vast manpower and industrial might to bear in building the overwhelming weaponry and forces that American military tactics use with devastating effect when fighting a total war like WWII or an unrestricted war for military victory like Gulf War 1, as distinct from politically and militarily hamstrung engagements like Korea and Vietnam). There is no question that America made the greatest contribution in men and materiel to the gruelling final advance on the Japanese home islands and to the critical naval war in the Pacific throughout the war, but it is a misrepresentation of history to assert that this is all there was to Japan’s defeat.
In different posts Varjag has treated contribution to the Pacific War as synonymous with contributing to the defeat of Japan. They are quite different things. For example, as Varjag rightly implies, Britain contributed virtually nothing to victory in the Pacific War in the way of armed forces [I find statements like this rather odious as they imply that the Allied forces who unsuccessfully fought the Japanese in Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and the Netherlands East Indies etc, did nothing because they were defeated, when there were plenty of other defeats along the road to victory, notably the string of defeats during the Kokoda Track retreat by Australian forces which are, quite reasonably, held up as valiant while, for example, nobody pays any attention to the gunners, or stokers, or other sailors on the doomed Repulse or Prince of Wales who fought their ships to the end and who were just as valiant.] Nonetheless, Britain made an important contribution to the defeat of Japan by holding Japanese forces against it in Burma and by its subsequent defeat of the Japanese in Burma. The presence of Britain’s Indian Ocean naval forces also held Japan in check to some extent, although the British force was more a deterrent to Japanese expansion than an aggressive fighting force, not least because finding ships for the fleet train required to sustain it for aggressive action was pretty much beyond Britain‘s resources and other commitments at the time. The geographic problem of transporting British forces to the Far East (or the Near North if you live in Australia) and supplying them was one of the reasons that Britain and America, with its geographic proximity to and bases in the Pacific, agreed early in the war against Japan that America should be primarily responsible for the Pacific. There were other reasons of post-war grand strategy which made this division of responsibility attractive to both America and Britain as America saw the Pacific as critical to its post-war strategic, economic, and other interests (have a look at a map and see which great anti-colonial nation, forged in the crucible of throwing off the shackles of colonial Britain in 1776, has strategically critical possessions acquired during WWII dotted around the Pacific while all the European colonial powers lost theirs within 15 or so years of the war) while Britain was more focused on regaining Burma and the Malayan peninsular and retaining India, all of which it duly lost . It is also worth noting that in the latter years of the war Australia had designs upon a post-war defensive bulwark of islands around it as a sort of mini-empire wrested from the Dutch and Portuguese, among others. No nation had clean hands in jockeying for post-war advantage for itself from about 1943 onwards.
Another example of the difference between contributing to the war in the Pacific and contributing to the defeat of Japan is Russia, which did not declare war on Japan until the closing days of the war and which contributed nothing significant to the defeat of Japan by sustained offensive action but it held significant Japanese forces against it and prevented their deployment elsewhere. Indeed, the need to keep its forces in place against a possible Russian attack was one of the reasons that in early 1942 the Japanese Army rejected Navy proposals for early invasion of Australia.
Contrary to the assertions in Dr Stanley’s papers to the effect that Australia did not pull its weight in WWII, Australia made a contribution at least proportionate to its size. In fact, Australia mobilized at a higher rate per capita than America. In 1944 Churchill, who like Dr Stanley and Varjag was contemptuous of Australia’s war effort (not least because he believed that Australia lost Singapore and Greece, which Churchill‘s outstandingly deficient military and strategic instincts ensured would be even greater defeats for Australia than his first spectacular disaster with Australian forces at Gallipoli in WWI), ordered his Chiefs of Staff to report on Australia’s deficiencies. To Churchill’s dismay, after careful consideration of Australia’s efforts in the SWPA, they reported that it was a very remarkable achievement on land and that the air and naval forces had also done well, and that the Chiefs hoped to learn from Australia’s performance.
Australia did not win the Pacific war or even make an overwhelming contribution to Japan’s defeat, but it made a sustained and important contribution without which the course of the war would have been different and much more adverse to the Allied position and to the defeat of Japan, and to the recovery of territory occupied by Japan.
Apart from doing the bulk of the land fighting in the SWPA in the first couple of years of the Pacific War and helping to lay the foundations for Japan's defeat while accommodating and contributing to feeding and supplying American forces in Australia and the Pacific, as well as contributing to feeding Britain throughout the war, Australia inflicted the first battle and campaign defeats on Japan during the war. Australia was the first nation to force the Japanese into retreat. Australia was the first nation to expel the Japanese from its own soil. Australia is the only nation not conquered by Japan in its external Pacific territories. Australia was the only English speaking nation at risk of invasion by the Japanese and it repelled them on land pretty much all by itself when its back was against the wall. It’s an impressive record for a small nation. Australia’s war effort deserves far more credit than Varjag and Dr Stanley are able to acknowledge.