Australians in the war.(Letters)(Letter to the editor)

SIR: It was good to read Peter Ryan (March 2008), in response to Max Hastings' Nemesis. Like Ryan I found the chapter on the Australians incomprehensible. Hastings was able to deal fairly with the Japanese!

There was for someone with my background an added irony, that while proclaiming 1944-45 as the "most inglorious of Australia's history as a fighting nation", Hastings could not even put Rabaul in his Brief Chronology at the end of Nemesis. The first mention of the Japanese invasion of New Guinea is February 3, 1942, under the heading "Japanese bombers attack Port Moresby, New Guinea" (sic: Port Moresby was the capital of Papua, a separate colony). The planes bombing Moresby were based at Rabaul, from Rabaul the Japanese fleet sailed, with transports, to the battle of the Coral Sea, and from Rabaul their troops left for the Owen Stanley Range.

Rabaul, on the island of New Britain, capital of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, was governed by Australia for the League of Nations. The fall of Rabaul, on January 23, 1942--it fell before Singapore--with its strategic harbour, two airports and wireless station, can be regarded as the greatest catastrophe in purely Australian history: no other nation was involved in the actual surrender. The Rabaul debacle was redeemed for Australia by the extraordinary self-sacrifice, courage and will to survive shown by individual Australians, civilian and military.

The strange role the Americans played in Rabaul before 1942 is seldom realised. The Australian government, instead of fortifying Rabaul, agreed to spend 666,500 [pounds sterling] on behalf of the United States to further develop New Caledonia. At the beginning of the war there had also been discussions with the Americans about developing Rabaul as a naval base, when this was summarily set aside by the Americans, Rabaul was left almost defenceless.

My book Masked Eden: A History of the Australians in New Guinea, gives a detailed account, with much primary source material, of the fall of Rabaul. Masked Eden documents too just how much the ...