This Day in History

[Jason Weiser]

I want to preface this post by admitting that I don't know a whole lot about Australia's military involvement in WWII. I'm not trying to stir up drama here, or insult anyone. I want the Australian perspective on this issue and that's why I'm posting this here.

In his history of the final year of the Pacific theater, Retribution, Max Hastings, a British historian, gives a scathing assessment of many Australian units in the Pacific theater, claiming that they fought neither hard nor well. He attributes this to the fact that the British sent the best Aussie units to fight in North Africa and Italy, leaving less well equipped, trained, and motivated troops behind to defend Australia. These units would later be sent to New Guinea and elsewhere in the PTO to fight the Japanese and, with a few notable exceptions, they did not perform particularly well. Hastings goes on to rip MacArthur for his costly vanity project of retaking the Philippines.

He also rips the Australian dockworkers for striking multiple times throughout the war, serious hampering Allied logistics.

How are these two issues seen by Australians Is there anything there or is Hastings so sort of Australiophobe

Rae,
I try not to take anything Hastings says too seriously. His book on Normandy was kinda insulting where he asserted the Germans were the finest army in the world at that point. I suppose in 1941, they were. But by 1944 Their finest was making all kinds of fatal land deals on the Eastern Front and what was left was concentrated in the Waffen-SS and select units. The rest Pick from Soviet and Polish POWs, older reservists, the lame and the sick and occupation troops. And the way he denigrated all the Allies, well, John Keegan was so maddened by it, he wrote Six Armies in Normandy as a response. Much better book IMO.

[dragoon500ly]

When I bought Hastings book, I was hoping for a detailed look into the British Army during the battle, its a decent overview of that. but Hastings pretty much blows off the accomplisments of the US Army, indeed, one is left with the opinion that if that idiot Eisenhower had simply shown the good sense to anoint dear Monty as ground forces commander, the war would have been over in time for the August holidays.

Objective he is not.

Jason, buddy, ole pal, you owe me for a new keyboard, read your tag line just as I was taking a sip of coffee.....

[HorseSoldier]

IMO, the whole not attacking civilians idiology came about because of WWII.

There's variation both through history and from culture to culture. In Europe, the idea that you didn't target civilians (at least not white, European civilians -- mileage may vary out in the colonies . . .) got established, I think, during the 1700s, and got more mileage in the century of relative peace between Napoleon and WW1. Part of the propaganda that justified the UK entering the war was how savage the German military was being to Belgian and Dutch civilians (which was deemed outside the pale of acceptable, civilized behavior, not just an aspect of how the game was played).

Obviously, things got notably nastier in WW2 and generated intensification of that sentiment. The big innovation evolving out of WW2 in this field is probably the idea of a world community that will hold combatants individually criminally accountable for actions that fall outside accepted wartime behavior.

[Raellus]

When I bought Hastings book, I was hoping for a detailed look into the British Army during the battle, its a decent overview of that. but Hastings pretty much blows off the accomplisments of the US Army, indeed, one is left with the opinion that if that idiot Eisenhower had simply shown the good sense to anoint dear Monty as ground forces commander, the war would have been over in time for the August holidays.

I don't know about the Monty thing. Hastings was pretty critical of Monty in Armageddon (his history of the last year of WWII in Europe), and his portrayal of Monty's handling of the multiple offensives around Caen during the Normandy campaign in Overlord was none too flattering either.

On a side note, reading Hastings' Overlord in high school (thank goodness for that free period) is what turned me on to WII.

I just want to know what Australians think about his accusations. I've read nothing but good things about the Aussies in North Africa and Anthony Beevor (in his recent single volume history of WWII), gives them props for their near superhuman efforts on the Kokoda trail. Heaven knows that not all American units peformed admirably during the war- we kind of bungled our way through North Africa and it was touch-and-go a couple of times in Italy- so I'm not trying to stir up trouble here along national fault lines. I'd just like the Australian POV on the matter.

[Targan]

Before I start I should say that Legbreaker is probably much better equipped than me to comment about Australia's WWII history. Also bear in mind that culturally, Australians and New Zealanders tend to celebrate the underdog (indeed, that's partly why we get so excited about events such as the Olympics, because on a per-capita basis we tend to do very well in the medal counts).

It's true that the best ANZAC forces were sent to Africa early in the war. Some were brought back to counter the rising threat of the Japanese but 2 big problems affected our ability to counter Japanese advances in the South Pacific. The first was that the bloody British gave up Singapore without a fight and we lost thousands of troops to Japanese prison camps (where they were used as slave labor and most of them were starved, worked and beaten to death) as a result.

Secondly, especially during much of the Kokoda Track campaign, most of the Australian troops involved against the Japanese in New Guinea were militia (what we now call the Army Reserve). Australia's Army Reserve forces these days are pretty good, especially for part timers, but back then they were sorely under-trained and under-equipped.

I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job of describing the Kokoda Track campaign in a nutshell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokoda_Track_campaign.

We fought a series of delaying actions over the mountains of New Guinea against Japanese who were much better equipped and more experienced and we still fought them to a standstill. At the time all that stood between the Japanese completely controlling Papua and then probably beating the hell out of Australia's northern communities were afew battalions of militia. I can't begin to imagine what a bummer it must've been, slogging through tropical jungle and mud IN THE MOUNTAINS! Much of the fighting was virtually face-to-face. The engagement distances weren't much further than muzzle flash and bayonet tip.

Australian forces have a long history of doing more with less, much like our British counterparts. I'm actually kind of amazed that the Australian Army is still a highly effective force because, unlike during WWI and WWII when most Australians were tough-as-nails country boys who grew up shooting and riding and roaming the bush, most Aussies these days are soft, pudgy, weak urban dwellers.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia's entry on the First Battle of Kokoda:

"Although the defenders were poorly trained, outnumbered and under-resourced, the resistance was such that, according to captured documents, the Japanese believed they had defeated a force more than 1,200 strong when, in fact, they were facing only 77 Australian troops."

That is an example of the "underdog" status that we Aussies tend to worship. The Gallipoli campaign and the Battle of Long Tan are other good examples. We don't necessarilly have to win a battle for it to be glorified in Australian history, we just have to "punch above our weight"

[Adm.Lee]

In his history of the final year of the Pacific theater, Retribution, Max Hastings, a British historian, gives a scathing assessment of many Australian units in the Pacific theater, claiming that they fought neither hard nor well. He attributes this to the fact that the British sent the best Aussie units to fight in North Africa and Italy, leaving less well equipped, trained, and motivated troops behind to defend Australia. These units would later be sent to New Guinea and elsewhere in the PTO to fight the Japanese and, with a few notable exceptions, they did not perform particularly well. Hastings goes on to rip MacArthur for his costly vanity project of retaking the Philippines.

He also rips the Australian dockworkers for striking multiple times throughout the war, serious hampering Allied logistics.

How are these two issues seen by Australians Is there anything there or is Hastings so sort of Australiophobe

I'm not an Australian, but a Pacific War student. It's kinda true, but not the whole truth.

The NZ (Wellington, IIRC) dockworkers' union were definitely not feeling any urgency in July '42, when the Marines needed to combat-load their ships before the Guadalcanal landings. Marines had to take over the docks. I'm not aware of any other incidents, that may have been the most serious.

Australia raised, IIRC, roughly 3 divisions before 1942, and two of those went to the Mediterranean, another went down at Singapore, so that left scattered small militia units to get overrun by the Japanese. If there had been more (and air cover) to make a real fight of Rabaul, that could have changed the course of the war. When those troops came back to fight on New Guinea, they struggled with the harsh terrain and slim logistics, but IMO they put in a better record than the green Americans in late 1942.

After that, it seems like MacArthur did his level best to sideline the Australians. It got to the point where there were Australian staff officers and units assigned to the Sixth US Army, so he created "Alamo Force", using only American elements to do all the same things that Sixth Army was supposed to do.