Australia under attack.(Max Hastings' Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45)

FOR YEARS, Max Hastings has personified the red-blooded, macho, up-front-with-the-troops British war correspondent. I occasionally wondered whether he might have rubbed a bit too closely against Ernest Hemingway, transplanting a few tufts of that famous chest-hair of which "Papa" was so proud. Over sixteen years, Hastings edited successively two of London's top dailies; he has published twenty books--not all of them on war; a few years ago this full life was recognised by a knighthood. (Has he repented becoming "Sir Max"? The title now appears rarely in blurbs and publicity.)

His most recent book is Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. Its central subject is Japan's evil chickens flying home to roost after the Pacific war it had begun so cockily in 1941. The preceding years of Allied struggle are sufficiently sketched to give depth and context to the denouement. Nemesis is a good enough book, except ...

Except that it is impossible for an Australian to read it without a surge of black outrage, with an aftertaste of gratuitous libel. Because of Hastings' record, and because Nemesis is already a bestseller, his charges should be answered; the present woeful ignorance of Australians about their own past makes the task of rebuttal more difficult, but more necessary.

In his book of nearly 800 pages, Hastings devotes one short (ten-page) chapter to Australia. And that chapter he titles "Bludging and Mopping Up". He calls 1945 "the most inglorious year in Australia's history as a fighting nation". He dwells lovingly for a whole page on the shortcomings of our drink-sodden, whoring, fat, repulsive and corrupt commander-in-chief, General Blamey; something weird there, because Blamey. had small influence on the great affairs of 1945, which ostensibly is Hastings' subject.

True, he bestows a kindly passing nod on our earlier fighting brilliance (Tobruk, Alamein); "Weary" Dunlop is wheeled on for a perfunctory mention. But the general picture of both Australia's armed forces and its civic life is one of decadence and decay.

These things Hastings alleges against a country which became a belligerent on day one of the Second World War against fascism; a nation of a mere 7 million persons, of whom over half a million fought overseas. Not even Soviet Russia put such a proportion of its people into uniform.

We sent three superb divisions to North Africa, the Middle East and Greece. The cream of our newly-trained aircrew went abroad to help Britain; much of our naval strength was in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, helping the Royal Navy.