Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

At my electorate's largest RSL, the Elsternwick-Caulfield RSL in St Georges Road there are regular meetings of the 39th Battalion, including on the 60th anniversary that the famous militia battalion was sent untrained and almost unarmed to defend the Kokoda Track before the regular elements of the Australian Army got there. They went in 900 and, as the famous film and the great books about Kokoda outline, they came out 300. There is the famous assembly, the military parade that took place at the end of military operations, that the great Lieutenant Colonel Owen, their commanding officer, held. Those ragged men in shorts—barely clothed after months of fighting the Japanese all the way to the edge of Port Moresby—are owed great credit by Australia. One of the most moving moments of my time in office was to have the great Chris Masters show his film The men who saved Australia at the Elsternwick RSL, to have the 60th anniversary celebrations there and then, at the end of the film, to have the remaining 17 veterans of the 39th Battalion—that great Victorian battalion—stand up and take the credit that was due to them.

In referencing Victory in the Pacific Day, nothing had to be like it was. Had it not been for the magic intercepts in my electorate at the Monterey block of apartments on Queens Road—an anonymous block of flats now with no memory of what happened there—the American carriers would never have positioned themselves to the north-west of Midway and sunk the four Japanese carriers that came to attack that central point of American defence of the Pacific thereby altering the course of the Second World War. If the Japanese had cooperated with the Germans, if the carrier force they had sent to Trincomalee to sink the British fleet there had continued their cooperation with the Germans all the way to Suez, the war would have probably ended in a very different way.

I want to speak about a sequence of events that led to Japanese-German non-cooperation, which benefited Australia and could never have been foreseen. On 1 June 1939 Georgii Zhukov, the famous Red Army commander, was summoned to the Kremlin. He thought he was going to be purged and put in the Lubyanka, as 30,000 Russian officers had been arrested and many of them tortured into making ludicrous confessions. But when Zhukov arrived in Moscow he was ordered by Stalin to fly to the Soviet satellite state of Outer Mongolia to command the Russian army there. Something very unusual happened—the least-known battle in history, and probably one of the most important. The battles of Khalkhin Gol, also known as the Nomonhan Incident, happened on the Russian-Chinese border in the puppet state of Manchukuo that was run by the Japanese. To the great surprise of the very arrogant Japanese army—the Kwantung Army that controlled that part and had attacked into the then Soviet Union without consulting even their own government—they faced a massive defeat at the hands of General Zhukov and the Red Army.

Many people have wondered why, at the crucial point of the Second World War when Japan attacked the United States, there was no cooperation between Russia and Japan. One-third of all of the supplies of the Russians came across the Bering Strait from Alaska to Vladivostok and areas around there, without interception by the Japanese Army. There was virtually no cooperation against the Soviet Union by the Japanese on behalf of the Germans. Indeed, if you read some of the great histories by Antony Beevor or other great historians, you will discover that, as the Germans were about to arrive in Moscow in October-November 1941, the Japanese diplomats in Berlin were sending telegrams to their masters in Tokyo telling them to attack south: 'The Germans will conquer Moscow. They'll conquer Russia. There is no need for us to participate in that joint operation against the Soviet Union.' If that had not happened, the entire course of the war in the Pacific would have been different. The Russian Siberian army, after the incidents at Khalkhin Gol, was transferred almost in its entirety in front of Moscow, and that is what changed the course of the war in front of the Russian capital. As I said, the Japanese decision to strike south came as the result of that.

The total strategic noncooperation of the Japanese Empire and their ally in the Pact of Steel, Nazi Germany, is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. It saved Australia. As the great Churchill instantly realised as soon as Japan attacked the United States, they had wakened a sleeping giant, and he knew from that minute that the Allies would persevere now that America was involved. We in Australia made our great strategic alliance with the United States. Our relationship was to bring back our troops from the Middle East. President Roosevelt, Mr Churchill and Prime Minister Curtin made a great decision to keep the Australian 9th Division at El Alamein, and the deal was that the Americans would bring a division here to defend Australia, as the Japanese were practically at the door. But strategically Churchill and Roosevelt were right. The decision of the Japanese and Germans not to cooperate together—the great strategic mystery of the Second World War—and the Japanese decision to strike south were inevitably going to lead to their defeat. Australia had many bloody years in that conflict in the Pacific, sometimes in a secondary role, but the safety of our country was preserved by that strange sequence of events that began with Zhukov's recall to Moscow and the decision to send him to fight the Japanese Kwantung Army in Mongolia. History would have been very different, however, if individuals—one can only describe them as immortals—from the Victorian 39th Battalion, the civilian militia who were sent up to the Kokoda Trail, had not fought every inch of the way back along that trail before the battalions from the regular Army, from the 7th Division, arrived to support them and eventually drive the Japanese out of a land attack across Papua New Guinea.

So let's thank goodness for the odd coincidences of history that strategically preserved Australia. Let's remember the great Pax Americana that has preserved all of those days since the end of the Second World War. One hopes that the peace and security of this region of the world is kept. We certainly have had a great period of economic prosperity, growth and peace ever since those days, with countries like Japan, Australia, China and all of the great countries of South-East Asia which have grown into maturity joining together in peace.

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