Warren Brown: Japanese Eyes On The Australian Prize
What if? This is one of the most intriguing aspects of history. The argument as to whether Australia was ever on Imperial Japanese drawing boards has raged since Pearl Harbour.
Last week, the vociferous Dr Peter Stanley, principal historian for the Australian War Memorial, produced a paper
designed to shout down anyone who believes Imperial Japan intended to invade Australia.
The answer is more complex than Dr Stanley points out.
It's unlikely a full-blown appreciation of an Australian invasion was ever put together, but that doesn't mean Imperial Japan didn't think about it.
Let's have a look at what happened back in '42. The speed with which the Japanese took the Pacific by the throat made everyone's head spin -- particularly the Japanese.
It was a bit of a surprise when, one after the other, massive colonial garrisons in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore fell over to a poorly equipped and overstretched army.
There was no way the Japanese army could ever contemplate an Australian invasion, but for a very brief window of time early in 1942, an emboldened, very well-equipped Japanese Navy had other ideas.
In January 1942, a proposal for an Australian campaign came from the Imperial Navy general staff.
Chief of the navy general staff's planning section Captain Tomioka Sadatoshi correctly feared Australia would become a vast marshalling area for American forces.
...
The general staff's planning section concluded that Australia either had to be isolated from the US, or knocked out of the war.
The navy proposed one or two divisions landing on strategically important points on the north coast of Australia, annihilating the enemy's maritime forces and severing Australian and American lines of communication. To what extent the Imperial Japanese Navy had prepared for such an adventure remains unclear.
In 1997, Hiromi Tanaka, a Japanese military historian with the National Defence Academy in Tokyo, presented a conference paper to the Australian War Memorial outlining the Imperial Japanese Navy's intentions towards Australia during 1942.
Tanaka's research discovered several items of interest in the collection of the US Library of Congress, including nautical charts of northern Australia, a Japanese language book entitled The Roster of Prominent Australians and a road atlas covering the area between Sydney and Melbourne. Unlike Nazi Germany, the Japanese were not great record keepers.
The Navy ministry on February 6, 1942 presented strong arguments for simultaneous invasions of eastern Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa.
...
However, the plan to invade Australia had its detractors. General Hideki Tojo, then prime minister, vehemently opposed the idea. As far as the army was concerned, a full-scale invasion was an enormous undertaking involving 10 to 12 divisions (between 150,000 and 220,000 men).
...
The Japanese could not hope to amass such a number of troops without pulling them out of the Philippines or China.
In order to reach a compromise, the two service arms agreed on the plan for Australia's isolation rather than embarking on invasion.
Last week, the vociferous Dr Peter Stanley, principal historian for the Australian War Memorial, produced a paper
designed to shout down anyone who believes Imperial Japan intended to invade Australia.
The answer is more complex than Dr Stanley points out.
It's unlikely a full-blown appreciation of an Australian invasion was ever put together, but that doesn't mean Imperial Japan didn't think about it.
Let's have a look at what happened back in '42. The speed with which the Japanese took the Pacific by the throat made everyone's head spin -- particularly the Japanese.
It was a bit of a surprise when, one after the other, massive colonial garrisons in Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore fell over to a poorly equipped and overstretched army.
There was no way the Japanese army could ever contemplate an Australian invasion, but for a very brief window of time early in 1942, an emboldened, very well-equipped Japanese Navy had other ideas.
In January 1942, a proposal for an Australian campaign came from the Imperial Navy general staff.
Chief of the navy general staff's planning section Captain Tomioka Sadatoshi correctly feared Australia would become a vast marshalling area for American forces.
...
The general staff's planning section concluded that Australia either had to be isolated from the US, or knocked out of the war.
The navy proposed one or two divisions landing on strategically important points on the north coast of Australia, annihilating the enemy's maritime forces and severing Australian and American lines of communication. To what extent the Imperial Japanese Navy had prepared for such an adventure remains unclear.
In 1997, Hiromi Tanaka, a Japanese military historian with the National Defence Academy in Tokyo, presented a conference paper to the Australian War Memorial outlining the Imperial Japanese Navy's intentions towards Australia during 1942.
Tanaka's research discovered several items of interest in the collection of the US Library of Congress, including nautical charts of northern Australia, a Japanese language book entitled The Roster of Prominent Australians and a road atlas covering the area between Sydney and Melbourne. Unlike Nazi Germany, the Japanese were not great record keepers.
The Navy ministry on February 6, 1942 presented strong arguments for simultaneous invasions of eastern Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia and Samoa.
...
However, the plan to invade Australia had its detractors. General Hideki Tojo, then prime minister, vehemently opposed the idea. As far as the army was concerned, a full-scale invasion was an enormous undertaking involving 10 to 12 divisions (between 150,000 and 220,000 men).
...
The Japanese could not hope to amass such a number of troops without pulling them out of the Philippines or China.
In order to reach a compromise, the two service arms agreed on the plan for Australia's isolation rather than embarking on invasion.