Hidden for 75 years, the top secret government documents outlining preparations for the event of a Japanese invasion of Australia in 1942 have finally been discovered. They reveal an extraordinarily comprehensive plan to thwart Japanese troops, and a population that would go to great lengths to avoid being enslaved.
The Scorched earth policy was Australia’s secret plan for total war under Japanese invasion in World War II.
In 1942 the threat of Japanese invasion hung over Australia. The men were away overseas, fighting on other fronts, and civilians were left unprotected at home.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese advance south, Prime Minister Curtin ordered state governments to prepare. From January 1942, a team frantically pulled together secret plans for a ‘scorched earth’ strategy. The goal was to prevent the Japanese from seizing resources for their war machine as they landed, and capturing Australians as slaves as they had done in Malaya and elsewhere in Asia.
From draining domestic water tanks to sinking dinghies and burning crops, from training special citizen squads to evacuating coastal towns, ‘Total war, total citizen collaboration’ was the motto. Today these plans vividly evoke the fraught atmosphere of the year Australia was threatened with invasion.
After the war these top secret plans were forgotten. This is the first time they have ever been made public.
To quote Peter Grose, author of An Awkward Truth and A Very Rude Awakening “This is a treasure trove, a gold mine, a Christmas-every-day cornucopia of rich Australian history”.
It is not an easy read as the majority of the book is a direct copy of the various plans that have recently been discovered in Federal and State Libraries. The work by Rosen must have been exhaustive and time consuming as various State Departments were made responsible for drawing up plans that would cover their “normal” portfolios such as water, coal industry, ports, etc. As a result each Department’s records needed to be searched.
The book is also full of contemporary propaganda posters, and photographs which look a little naive now but were fun to look at. The “General Citizen Code” was interesting to read, but I am not sure that today’s generation would have the same “buy-in” as our grandparents did!
I found the book interesting and very informative, but it was one I only skimmed through as most of its pages are are taken from the actual plans themselves and are written in 1940’s Public Service jargon! Don’t get me wrong they are a good read but so many of them are duplications – smash, burn, or destroy the wharf, the coal mine, the crop etc,
Worth buying if you are interested in what was Australia’s exhaustive plans to deal with a Japanese invasion. It is similar to Defending Island Britain previously posted on and this would be a better purchase if you are in the UK.