by Ann Howard
My permanent return to the southern suburbs didn’t happen until 1948, although I often came down in the steam train alone to visit the family in school holiday time from 1944 onwards - a period rich in memories for me as I was soon to see the first of the ‘displaced persons’ arrive at Circular Quay, the ships’ funnels all making the proud announcement with the initials ‘DP’.
Some children went backwards and forwards. Bill Geoghlin, who had been in the country:
For some reason we were returned to Sydney but following reports of Japanese lanes overflying Sydney and the midget submarine raid, we went to the bush to the same situation as before, except another sister was in charge of us.
When Singapore fell February 15, 1942, there was a lot of anti-British feeling in Australia. In her book When the Children Came Home, Julie Summers describes how young Robert Arbuthnott arrived after the fall of Singapore with his family and was beaten up by four 17 year old Australian students at Knox Grammar School. They broke his nose.
It was a sobering thought that while inland country towns in Australia were less likely to be threatened by enemy action, in a time of emergency there could be many things country people could be called upon to do as part of the national war effort. In the event of a coastal attack or bombing raids on the cities the people in country districts would have to play an important part in the plans for the evacuation of women and children. Invasion fears are reflected in boxed advertisements in the Press, showing the energetic movement of evacuees. Country people offered help such as, ‘Evacuee’s children’s nurse has vacancies for children in country home’, and coastal people looked for refuge with advertisements like, ‘Soldier’s wife, two children, wants country board’, for instance.
Chapter 7
Will We Lose Our Country?
Whenever there was a raid …they were all turned out of the factory to the trenches because it was assumed that an aircraft factory would be a priority target. Everyone was sure the Japs would be back.
– Cassie Thornley
When war was declared, there was a mix of emotions fear, excitement, patriotic fervour. Those touched by it before were full of dread. Stan Gratte still remembers his mother’s face even after all this time:
I came home in the afternoon to find my mother in a most unusual mood. She had a look of intense sadness, of which I still have a picture in my mind. She said, ‘War has been declared. We are at war.’ Mum had three brothers in WWI, all gassed or shot or both. Her boyfriend had been killed at the Somme in France and she well knew what was to come about.
There is no doubt that the level of fear and concern was great in the civilian population and they reacted by protecting their children. Some were sent more than a day’s travel away:
Before the war, Australian politicians of all persuasions first followed the policy of appeasement, (notably Robert Menzies). When war was declared by Britain, Australian eyes met, knowing that from that moment, their lives would change from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Australians would follow Britain into war without question. Britain was a major trading partner, British banking dominated the Australian scene, British immigrants were still pouring into the country, and British history was taught in schools. Australia looked to the British Navy to protect her shores and when Australians left their native shores; their first destination was inevitably Britain. It first appeared that Australia’s role in the war would be as a main supplier of meat, wool and dairy goods. US President Roosevelt would say later, ‘food is a weapon of total war fully as important as guns, planes and tanks’.
By 1940, Australians were reading about the London Blitz. On Saturday, 7 September, 375 German bombers throbbed their way across Kent to London - too many for the RAF fighters to stop. They struck at the docks, industrial and trade heartland of London. Incendiaries and high explosives rained down into the sheets of flame already consuming warehouses, factories and homes. Cecil Beaton’s photograph of three year old Eileen Dunne sitting up in a hospital bed with a bandaged head, clutching a battered teddy bear, started his career. Jack Buchanan sang Everything Stops for Tea. The British scanned long lists of casualties and dead in the newspapers.
In Australia, about 7,000 residents, mostly male, including more than 1,500 British nationals, deemed ‘enemy aliens’ were interned. A further 8,000 people were interned after being detained overseas by allies. More than 12,000 people were herded into camps, even if domiciled in Australia for years. People hastily requested naturalisation.
With so much complacency, why were Australian civilians so ready to believe a Japanese invasion was imminent after the fall of Singapore? How did the military perceive the situation? Were the governments prepared?
Invasion fears are deep seated in the island that is Australia. Suspicion had fallen onto different groups in the past - French, Russians, Chinese and for quite a while, the Japanese. The French explored Botany Bay and settled Akaroa in New Zealand and invited settlers there. Until Napoleon was defeated by Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805, they were a definite presence in this region. The Russians were occasionally viewed with deep distrust. In 1882, when three friendly Russian navy ships – the Africa, Vestnik, and Plastun docked in Melbourne, the Press sparked widespread fears of a Russian invasion, but after things were sorted out, a civic ball was given in their honour! The Chinese were also seen as potential invaders, despite the fact that they had explored the coast in Confucius’ time and returned to their own country. Japan has been the only country that has actually attacked Australian soil, making invasion fears a reality.
Distrust of Japan was publicly demonstrated as far back as 1896, when reports of Japanese trading interests led to a Premier’s Conference. The trading proposal by the Japanese was refuted by Australia (and later by New Zealand). The Conference recommended that all Australian colonies extend their legislation to exclude coloured persons. Japanese and Chinese labourers were deemed ‘undesirable’ in the following 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, which was the basis of the White Australia Policy, decisively carried by the Australian Labor Party, at the time of the 1901 Federation. The Policy also addressed threats of hostile invasion and defence against invaders. As a shaping of national identity and with the appearance of protecting the Australian wage earner, the WAP brought with it a fixation on whiteness. The intent of the Policy ignored the fact that global labour and expertise had been brought in to accomplish world class projects in Australia. For instance, in the building of the Hawkesbury River Bridge from 1886-89, 3,000 workers, most from overseas, descended on the river banks with their expertise to build the bridge for its American managers. A local pub was called the ‘All Nations Hotel’.
Australians were reinforced in their invasion concerns with slogans like ‘yellow peril’ and ‘populate or perish’. Widely read invasion novels, cartoons and comics said that only as a nation with a clear identity and racial purity could Australia react powerfully to an invasion attempt. So the majority thinking was that Australia should prepare for invasion, the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese workers was an imperative, and the ‘right kind’ of immigrant was needed to build up and defend the Australian way of life. Enthusiastic in the belief that accelerated British migration would make Sydney the first Australian city to reach a population of one million, Sir Arthur Rickard founded the Millions Club in 1912, but the millions would have to be white Anglo Saxon child migrants, of above average intelligence and perfect physical wellbeing from the UK. This screening resulted in British brother and sister potential migrants being parted because one of them wore glasses or one had not had measles.
In the terms of the day the White Australia Policy expressed the fear of Australia being isolated and ringed by hostile Asian countries. Current sentiment was clear when for the first time in 160 years of European settlement, Australia was directly threatened, Prime Minister John Curtin said: ‘…this country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the Sout
h Seas an outpost of the British race’. Deep seated racism later led The Advisory War Council to decide on 12 January, 1942, that’ no black American troops would be accepted in Australia since it could affect …the maintenance of the White Australia Policy in post-war settlement’. This slur on our ally was hastily erased.
Within hours of Japan entering the war, Japanese men working in the Torres Strait and West Australian pearling industry were arrested, because they were familiar with the coastline and reefs of Torres Strait. Australians had purchased copies of their charts in 1923, used by the Allies. Over a million copies of a Japanese book The Inevitable Anglo-Japanese War published in 1935 had been sold. Wartime advertisements for Liberty Loans emphasised the destruction of Australian country towns, with vivid black and white drawings. In 1937, the Sunday Times reported a party from an Australian farm were guests at Vancouver’s Canadian Pacific Exhibition and a Mr Gradbury of Goulburn told interviewers that. ‘… the Empire’s greatest danger is a Japanese invasion of Australia’. There is a mountain of evidence about spying on both sides, of course. Les Reedman recalls that the bags of a Japanese diplomatic mission were searched in 1938:
They were found to have maps in their bags with pencil marks on strategic points from Port Stephen to Shoalhaven.
A letter sent to Prime Minister John Curtin by Mr Herbert Yeates, Member of the Legislative Assembly for East Toowoomba, Queensland stated that ‘…a Mr Griffiths, a highly respected citizen, had met an officer in the Japanese Naval Reserve in Singapore six years previously who had spoken of plans to invade Australia if Singapore fell.’
To aggravate invasion fears, there were soon sporadic instances of bombing and shelling around Australia.
Australians kept their spirits up in different ways, some by keeping busy, some by prayer, some with ‘blackout parties’ where special ‘bomb cocktails’ were served - ‘high explosive’ and ‘delayed action’, to name but a few. At some parties, masks were worn, those without masks being fined, proceeds going to the RAAF Comforts Fund.
While many civilians became increasingly uneasy, rumours and panic swept Canberra in the autumn of 1942, according to historian Paul Hasluck, and intelligence advisors, like civilians, made tentative predictions, trying to piece together bits of information to learn Japanese intentions. General MacArthur told the War Council he did not think Japan would invade. Allied intelligence was amazingly efficient, in decoding difficult German and Japanese messages, working together with Bletchley Park, but the Japanese themselves were arguing about invasion proposals and did not have a cohesive policy.
Eddie Ward, Labor opposition politician, was supposedly leaked evidence by a Major working in the Secretary for Defence Office, about the Menzies’ government’s ‘defeatist’ and ‘treacherous’ plan that large tracts of Australia’s north would be abandoned to the invaders - The Brisbane Line. He spoke about it publicly at Preston, Victoria. A similar concept had already been rejected by Prime Minister Curtin and the Australian War Cabinet and they refuted Ward’s comments, but Ward continued his accusations during late 1942 and early 1943. The idea that it was an actual defence strategy, gained momentum after General Douglas MacArthur referred to it during a Press conference in March 1943, as the ‘Brisbane Line’. Ward claimed that some relevant files had been removed but a resulting Royal Commission concluded that no such documents had existed.
MacArthur, in his own memoir Reminiscences, stated that if an invasion did occur the Australian military would establish a line of defence following the Darling River from Brisbane to Adelaide. But in those nervous days, civilians quickly had the idea of the Brisbane Line firmly fixed in their minds.
The idea lives on. In his book The Brisbane Line, Hugh MacMaster says: ‘According to many historians, the Brisbane Line was studied as a sensible fall back in which a badly depleted Australian army, whose major forces were still abroad, would trade space for time to build up its strength engage allies and bring divisions back to Australia. It was a sensible sort of strategic concept - as the Russians were to demonstrate in their ‘scorched earth policy’, of leaving an advancing enemy nothing of worth. And it was a concept feared by the most senior Japanese general to study a possible invasion of Australia, Lieutenant- General Yamashita, nicknamed the ‘Tiger of Malaya’ for his defeat of the British, Australian and Indian forces in Malaya and Singapore.
An Army Development Guide drew a ‘Newcastle Line, north of Newcastle and arcing around Port Augusta, the area contained by it estimated as a heartland without which Australia cannot survive in its present state. Currently we are dependent on our allies in a national crisis, and this of course was the situation in 1942.
Being convinced of an invasion did not give anybody certainty of when, where and how it would happen. Australia seethed with ideas and rumours. The Times in London mused that Japan might attempt to establish naval and aerial bases at Darwin, and perhaps Broome and Wyndham and launch attack on coastal cities from there. Residents around Australia were convinced the Japanese were going to land where they were. There are numerous accounts of Japanese landings, mostly unsubstantiated. One story is that the enemy set up a radio on Middle Brother Mountain, near Taree, and a small number of Japanese were captured at Old Bar. An imminent landing at Coffs Harbour was feared. Plans were in place to move residents, stock and produce to the Tablelands, which had a fortress mentality. Barriers were built near Ebor, half way between Armidale and Coffs Harbour in May 1942, with road ends packed with 1,800 pounds of gelignite. To prevent the roadway being bypassed, the expensive Ebor Tank Barrier was constructed, the longest of all barriers built in WWII.
With concerns that Tasmania would be invaded, largely because of the state’s zinc industry, children were evacuated from Hobart. Geraldton, West Australia was also prepared for the worst. Civilians, apprehensive after the disappearance of HMAS Sydney off the Geraldton coast in November 1941, were aware of German subs in striking distance of the west coast. Air raid shelters were dug for the 600 school children in the isolated city. Were they going to be part of a scorched earth policy?
Missions at Roper River and the surrounding country were emptied because that was imagined another possible entry for the Japanese. At Yeppoon, locals thought there would be a pincer movement from them to Hervey Bay. An eccentric local lady at Yeppoon said a Japanese submarine had landed and she saw Japanese coming ashore for fresh water. She was ‘put away’… but who knows?
By late 1941, civilians were convinced of an invasion of Sydney. A People’s Army was formed. Members of the co-ordinating committee included Lieutenant-Colonel Hyman, the President of the Retired Servicemen’s League, Charlie Nelson, the General President of the Miner’s Association and Jim Healey, the General Secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Women’s voluntary groups were drawn on for this army. In the Ku-ring-gai section on the North Shore of New South Wales alone there were 300 women members.
All the talk was of war, but there was still an underlying air of unreality. On 31 May, 1942, a group of AWAS coming back off leave to 2nd Australia Corps at Burnside Homes, Parramatta, were on the Manly ferry followed by the Japanese midget submarines. By the time they had taken the train from Wynyard to Parramatta, and the bus to camp, there were a series of alerts, blackouts and continual gunfire. The AWAS, wearing tin hats and gas masks crouched under the tables, cursing the Generals for putting them through this exercise - not realising it was the real thing! It was not until the following day that the Harbour raid was common knowledge, and then it was relegated to page 3. In May 1942, there was an increase in Japanese submarine movement along the eastern coast of Australia. In 1942, NF461970 Steward, Jenny, (later Johns), was peering through a narrow slit watching shipping in Port Kembla, working two hours on and two hours off and scanning the Harbour for intruders:
Everyone was aware of the daring raid and knew it could be repeated.
Cassie Thornley remembers her cousin Beryl worked in an Aircraft Factory, one of the 600 or so from all over t
he country converted to build Australia’s only homemade aircraft, the Beaufort Bomber:
It was based on the English one, but the Brits refused to send us the plans because they were a war secret, so ours had many parts, including the landing gear, redesigned. Beryl’s factory had previously made motorcar parts. It was at Marrickville. There were trenches out the back, everyone tried to get all the children away from that area. Whenever there was a raid (or perhaps ships sighted off the coast?) they were all hurried out of the factory to the trenches, because it was assumed an aircraft factory would be a priority target. Everyone was sure the Japs would be back.