Anglosphere co-operation.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: In my article "David Day's Defence Mythology" (November 2004) I inadvertently omitted an important point.

Day claims that in the Second World War Britain did not send Australia naval help at the time of the Japanese threat. I mentioned briefly that (apart from the fact that Britain did send the battleship HMS Warspite) America was able to help Australia because Britain was taking the strain in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. There is a particularly significant example.

Early in 1942 a huge Japanese fleet, spearheaded by battleships and the elite carrier strike force which had hit Pearl Harbor and then Darwin, entered the Indian Ocean. It fought a series of air battles with British forces, sinking two heavy cruisers and the only British carrier present, the little old HMS Hermes. However, it lost about fifty aircraft and pilots and did not enter the Indian Ocean again.

This had two consequences. Had the Japanese fleet not been engaged by the British, it could have run wild in the Indian Ocean, bombarding and raiding the West Australian coast. The main shore-battery defences of Perth and Fremantle were two 9.2-inch guns on Rottnest Island, which of course were on fixed mountings and would not have lasted long against battleship bombardment. Albany, where the American submarines were then trying to regroup, was even more vulnerable to attack, and no other West Australian coastal towns had ...