I've been looking for the Book by the Japanese Marine Lt. No Luck so far. I remember the story from the Mid-day show with Kerry Ann Kennelly interview.

Bazz,

Have you come across this report?

http://www.dawn.com/news/820634

Interesting link leoj. I have known for many many years that Malaya
was attacked first by a small amount if time.

The Ambush
The first real contact between Australian and Japanese troops was during the evening of 14-15 January 1942 at a wooden bridge west of Gemas in Malaya.
The Australians mounted a successful ambush at the bridge before withdrawing to link up with their main force for the larger battle at Gemas. By the afternoon of the next day, the Australian were pushed back. The 2/30th Battalion had lost 81 men killed, wounded or missing and there were an estimated 1,000 casualties to the 5th Japanese Division.

I've been there. We used to stop there on the way to Kulang to go Skydiving. There is a large Planck on the Bridge describing the Battle in great detail. It's about 1.5 x 1 meters in Bronze. I've also camped at the Japanese Invasion site in Kelantan & seen the wrecked bunkers. Around the same place I ran into the Orang Aslie, Native Australasian people. Very interesting. Then we used to stop off at the Old Colonial Office, which is a Hotel/Restaurant with rooms. They did a very nice Morning Tea in the Old Colonial Style.

It's pretty well established that the Japanese had no immediate plans to invade Australia during the early months of the Pacific war.

Which is not to say that Australia had no plans to defend itself so far as it could.

Australia's gold reserves were locked up in the Broken Hill jail, on the theory that if the Japanese managed to fight through and capture it (a very long shot), there was no way they would get it back to the coast. Australian troops who later fought at Milne Bay trained at Currimundi Lake on the Sunshine Coast, before being put onto trains and taken to Townsville for embarkation to PNG. There are still street signs (next to the Currimundi Primary School) warning that unexploded ordnance may be found in the area, which is still mostly an undeveloped paddock.

Back in the mid-70s I wrote an honours thesis on the administration of Charles Abbott, a former Country Party politician who was the administrator of the Northern Territory from 1936 to 1946. Judging from the papers I accessed at that time, I was one of the first to have researched that period. One document I saw related to a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff. When one of them asked if Singapore was likely to fall, the Navy COS replied that it would not, "because the Admiralty told us so."

The other often forgotten fact is that when (mainly) Australian troops defeated the Japanese at Milne Bay in August-September 1942 it was the first time that the Japanese Imperial Army had been defeated on land.

The intention of the Japanese seemed to be to capture the three airstrips at the western end of Milne Bay. Operating from there, Japanese aircraft could easily have caused major damage to Port Moresby, Darwin, Broome, Cairns and Townsville. While such attacks did not represent an intention to occupy the Australian mainland, they would certainly have tied up a large part of Australia's modest defence forces.

Hi Calwest,

Just out of interest, did you find much from the period when Abbott was NT Administrator about Aboriginal (or more specifically, if indelicately, half-caste) children and the reasons why they were evacuated south after Darwin was bombed ? And any other directives about 'taking children away' ? Isn't it fascinating (but very disappointing too) that precious records are so rarely examined ?

In 1992, fifty years after Sydney Harbour was attacked, I rang my mum up to remind her. She started to laugh and explained that my father worked on the munitions train to Brisbane and was due to go up that night. She said he went white as a sheet; she made his lunch like it was the last meal of a condemned man. Of course he knew about the Hawkesbury River Bridge, the only rail (and main road) link between south and north Australia.

The unexpected twists of history :)

Cheers,

Joe