Most accounts of Australia in the Second World War are understandably dominated by the major campaigns. Singapore, Kokoda, Milne Bay, Buna, the fighting in New Guinea and the final campaigns of 1945 provide a familiar framework for understanding Australia’s war against Japan.
There was, however, another war taking place beyond these conventional battlefields.
It was fought by small groups of men operating in occupied territory, by coastwatchers reporting Japanese movements from isolated islands, by intelligence parties inserted from submarines and small boats, and by independent companies attempting to survive after the conventional front had moved past them. Just as importantly, it depended upon local people who provided information, food, shelter, transport and knowledge of country that Australians could never have acquired for themselves.
That is the subject of my new book, War Among the People: Australian Small Unit Warfare in the Second World War, 1941–1945.
The idea for the book developed from something that had increasingly interested me while researching Australian operations in the Pacific. We often describe these activities individually. There are histories of the coastwatchers, accounts of the independent companies, books about Z Special Unit and studies of particular clandestine operations. What interested me was what happened when they were considered together.
A pattern began to emerge.
These operations were conducted across an enormous geographical area and under very different circumstances, but the same problems appeared repeatedly. Small groups had to survive beyond the conventional battlefield. They needed reliable intelligence, communications with distant headquarters and some means of moving through territory occupied by the Japanese. Above all, they needed people who knew the country.
This last point became increasingly important as I worked on the book.
The popular image of clandestine warfare tends to concentrate upon the operative. A few men land secretly on an enemy occupied coast, disappear into the jungle and somehow continue operating until they are extracted. It makes for a compelling story, but it can also obscure much of what actually made such operations possible.
Behind many of those Australians stood networks of local people.
They were guides, carriers, messengers, scouts and sources of intelligence. Some provided food or shelter. Others watched Japanese movements or carried information across country that Australian operatives barely understood. On Timor, the relationship between Australian troops and their Timorese supporters became fundamental to survival. Similar patterns appeared elsewhere across the South West Pacific.
The risks were not shared equally. An Australian operative might eventually be evacuated. The people who had assisted him remained behind.
That uncomfortable reality is one reason I settled upon the title War Among the People. The hidden war was not conducted across an empty landscape. It took place within communities already attempting to survive occupation, violence and uncertainty.
The book begins with the rapid Japanese advance of 1941 and 1942, when many of Australia’s assumptions about how a Pacific war would be fought collapsed with remarkable speed. From there it looks at the organisations that emerged to conduct intelligence and clandestine operations, the role of civilian and Indigenous networks, and the coastwatching system that stretched across the islands to Australia’s north.
The second half moves into particular operations.
Some will be familiar to readers interested in Australian special operations, while others are considerably less well known. Operation Copper, the disastrous reconnaissance of Muschu Island in April 1945, is particularly revealing because courage could not overcome weaknesses in intelligence, communications and extraction planning. Python and Platypus show how clandestine operations developed in Borneo as Allied forces moved closer to returning in strength. Operation Lizard demonstrates the dangers created when an intelligence network became compromised, while Operation Hornbill is interesting for almost the opposite reason. It was an ambitious operation that was planned but never carried out.
I deliberately wanted to include failure and abandonment alongside successful operations. Special operations history can too easily become a succession of daring missions in which audacity is treated as evidence of military value. The historical record is considerably more complicated. Some operations succeeded. Some achieved only part of what was intended. Others failed badly, and occasionally the most sensible military decision was not to undertake the operation at all.
Nor do I argue that Australia suddenly developed a formal or uniquely Australian doctrine of irregular warfare. Much was inherited from British experience, much was improvised, and different organisations sometimes approached similar problems in different ways.
Nevertheless, when these experiences are placed beside one another, certain recurring practices become difficult to ignore: small groups, decentralised initiative, wireless communication, intelligence, mobility, concealment, local knowledge, human relationships and, perhaps surprisingly, restraint. A patrol that avoided a Japanese position and transmitted useful information could achieve more than one that attacked the enemy and revealed its presence.
That is really what War Among the People is about.
It is not an attempt to replace the familiar history of Australia’s Pacific War. The conventional campaigns remain central to that story. Instead, the book looks into the spaces between those campaigns and at the people operating there, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Australian formation.
Some carried rifles. Some carried radios. Others carried messages, food or knowledge.
Together they fought a war in which information could matter more than firepower, survival could itself become an operational achievement, and the people living within the battlefield were often as important as the soldiers sent into it.
War Among the People: Australian Small Unit Warfare in the Second World War, 1941–1945 is my attempt to tell that part of the story.
The book is available on Amazon and Kindle/Kindle unlimited.
There are three more books at the final editing stage and I hope these will be out before the end of the year. They are Operation Hackney about the Campaign on Goodenough Island, Operation Sparrow about the failed defence of Timor and Ambon, and the story of the SS Stikine, a Liberty Ship which exploded in Bombay harbour in WW2. It is good when a couple of years of hard work finally comes together. This time all at once!