Backbencher

Evan Kimball
Professor Isern
History of Australia and New Zealand
May 5, 2006
Aussies in WWII
The Australian presence in the Second World War is a topic that is often ignored in American History classes and possibly those of other countries. I personally had heard almost nothing about it until I took the History of Australia and New Zealand class at North Dakota State University. But Australia did in fact take part in the war, and they also did some fighting that wasn’t necessarily in their best interest.
Even before its colonial days Australia seemed to desire the chance to prove themselves to Britain, their mother country. They seemed to have tried to provoke more British colonial interest in the Far East to make the Empire stronger and also insure their protection from invading nations. Into WWII the Australians had hoped for the build of a large naval fleet in their area. The British never really did build this fleet though. It is possible that they didn’t fear hostile forces on that side of the world and instead focused their sailing on transportation and the trade of goods. In fact, it did seem the Japanese power at the beginning of the war in Pacific caught almost everyone off guard.
When WWII broke out in Europe, Australia was quick to send soldiers to aid in the fighting. Australian troops helped fight the Axis powers in, “Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa.”[1] They were given dangerous assignments and it sometimes felt as if the British were using them as cannon fodder. The Australians fought desperate campaigns at the Suez Canal, Greece, Crete, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.[2] Battling in these areas was involved with the three part Australian plan for the war which involved acting as, “a granary for countries on the front lines such as the British Isles; they could help drive German and Italian forces from the north coast of Africa; they could help drive the Japanese from conquered territories in the Pacific.”[3]
The Australians also faced a shortage of supplies and the inability to make them for themselves. One thing they had hoped for was to sell agricultural products to other countries, especially Britain and obtain planes and other weapons of war from the British. But the British were simply too busy trying to produce for themselves to fight the German air raids on their own country. The Australians knew that they lacked a ground force capable of fighting off the Japanese and hoped to boost up their naval and air powers.
The Japanese advance through Southeast Asia was moving very rapidly. Many of these nations simply lacked the armed forces to repel such an attack. One reason for this is very simple; many of these countries were not independent. The British, Dutch, and French, among others, all possessed colonies on the coasts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The nations in control of these Asian lands were either busy fighting the Nazis or had already been conquered by them. The Axis alliance was sort of a double-edged sword for colonial nations in Europe. While the Germans were fighting them in their homelands, the Japanese and Italians were attacking their colonies, forcing them to spread out their troops and separating them from the resources of those lands. The British for example, were fighting to protect their own country while also defending Palestine and the Middle East, and fighting the Japanese in Asia.
Certain events early in the war also had a drastic effect on the Asian warfront, although indirectly. The hasty surrender of France may have protected Paris from being leveled, but it also lead to several negative effects for Australia and the British Empire. German troops in France placed the Axis that much closer to British landfall and also made Europe easier to defend from Allied invasion since they had control of the coastline. French surrender also opened up their colonies to Japanese invasion. So the Axis acquired a quick victory over and ally power that should have a major threat to their plans, and were able to move closer to their next target on both fronts.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was actually quietly celebrated by the British and Australians. The British Empire had been praying for the entry of America into the war. An event like Pearl Harbor was something for which they had been hoping. What they hadn’t expected was the Japanese attacks on other Asian ports at the same time. The Americans were entering into the war, but almost their entire Pacific fleet was at the bottom of the ocean, and the British fleet in the Pacific was on the retreat.
The British still claimed to be working in the best interest of the Australians, but many of the Aussies could see the imminent danger they were in. At the time it was believed, and it was probably true, that the British were more interested in protecting India. India was the pride of the British Empire in Asia and would not be lost lightly, so they claimed that it was important to protect and that Australia was safe when, “Churchill refused to concede that Australia lay exposed to the Japanese”[4]
The Japanese bombings in the Northern Territory and Western Australia proved that they were definitely in danger of invasion. Once problem they knew they faced was that they didn’t have enough troops to defend their country. This wasn’t simply because their armed forces were spread out all over the battlefronts, but because the country itself was too physically large for their population to protect. After the war, this fact would lead to a drive for immigrants to move to Australia. The nation desired to never feel so vulnerable again.
The war was turning on all fronts after the United States joined in. The Middle East proved too difficult for the Axis to hold, along with Northern Africa, and they were forced to return to Europe. The Allies invaded Normandy and opened the door to the reclaiming of Europe. The United States Navy along with Australian troops were turning the tide in Pacific War. Even the Soviets had shown the ability to hold back the Nazi invasion. But as the Soviets were chasing the Nazis, some Australians took it with mixed emotions with, “anxious if not strident voices of alarm and prophecy began to be raised again in Australia about the threat of communism to western civilization.” Even with the war still raging around them, the Australians were looking to the future. At least one Australian feared Asian communism particularly when he told a Donald Horne, “that he expected that China would conquer Southeast Asia by 1957.”[5]
Australians celebrated the end of the war in Europe just like the other Allies, and they were able to do so because the Allied Alliance in the Pacific was also nearing victory. With the end of the war the Australians set forth to fix the deficiencies and dependencies they had had during the war and formed an Alliance with the United States, since they had saved them from the Japanese where the British had failed.

[1] www.awm.gov.au
[2] Clark, 263.
[3] Clark, 270
[4] Day, 211.
[5] Horne




Bibliography
Clark, Manning. A Short History of Australia. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1995.
Day, David. The Great Betrayal. Sydney Australia, Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1988.
Horne, Donald. “Australia Looks Around.” Foreign Affairs. Vol. 44 Issue 3 (April 1966): 446-457
Second World War 1939 – 1945, http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/ww2.htm. (accessed May 5, 2006)