The only reason Australian isn’t a Japanese country today is because the Americans came out here and fought with us to defeat the Japanese.
My Dad remembers there being 100,000 Americans here in World War 2

General McArthur(The American general in charge) was one of those generals who knew how to fight a war, unlike Churchill who sent thousands of our men to die by sending them to land on a certain beach overlooked by cliffs in Turkey. You all know it. It’s called Gallipoli. A major Australian defeat and bloodbath. We were sent there by the British.

When the Japanese were advancing on Australia, Churchill wanted our army to go and defend Britain. He said let Australia fall we’ll get it back later.

Back to General McArthur. The Australian government decided not to defend Queensland and drew the Brisbane line. My Dad will tell you the names of people he knew who just walked out of their homes up here and fled south. It was general McArthur who said, no, we’ll defend Australia in the North. What a wise decision that was, imagine trying to defend the rest of Australia from attack after the Japanese had established bases up here in the North.

It was also McArthur who used planes to defend the army on the ground. Churchill was to set on the idea that his beloved Navy was the supreme fighting force in Britain and maintained a separation of the forces.

Why we give Britian more credit for our victory in WW2 and say little about the fact that it was actually America who pulled our bacon out of the fire puzzles me

Cherful,

Thats a very lopsided view of Macat=rthur

Firstly, Macarthur was NOT a great general. He was a massive egotist. He allowed his air forces to be destroyed on the ground by the Japanese in the Phillipines. He later escaped leaving most of his men behind but not without taking 7.5 million (in todays money) from the Phillipino's.

The majority of the land forces that he commanded (in battle)during the fighting in New Guniea, were Australian. Ably led by Australian Generals. However Macarthur did everything in his power to exclude Australians from the uppper levels of command. He surrounded himself with his mates from the Phillipines days, the so-called Battan gang, many of whom were entirely incompetent.

Marcarthur claimed to have been present for the fighting in New Guniea, and in fact was awarded a mdeal on that basis, however it was never true. Marcarthur routinely lied about his exploits. He sought, and was granted control over what the asutalian media was allowed to report. They were limited to reprinting his comminques which were notorious lies designed to make MAcarthur look good.

He was finally fired during the Korean war, for threatening to nuke the North Koreans/Chinese against the wishes of his governement.

Macarthur does not come close to Churchill when it comes to Generalship. Macarthur was only ever interested in the glory and wealth of Macarthur. Churchill was the foundation upon which victory over Hitler was built.

If what you say about McArthur is right then it seems as though both him and Churchill were detrimental to Australian interests in WW2 given the huge strategy mistake at Gallipoli by Churchill and the fact that Churchill was prepared to let Australia fall to the Japanese,undefended. It was Australian Prime Minister, Curtain who went against Churchill and brought our troops home to defend Australia instead of Britain as Churchill wanted.
(Although it was McArthur who made the decision to defend Australia from the north rather then let Japanese bases and towns be estalished there, with the drawing of the Brisbane line by our politicians.)

Australian soldiers were magnificient in their fight against the Japanese, as Australian troops always are but they could not have beaten the Japanese on their own, being hopelessly outnumbered and lacking the military equipment they would have needed. It was the American soldiers who fought in the Islands and Pacific who gave them the support they needed to save Australia from the Japanese.

Whether they would have done so is debateable had they not themselves been attacked by the Japanese,but the point I was trying to make is they were no different in being prepared to let Australia fall to the Japanese than Churchill was when the chips were down. So why does Churchill get applauded and America barely acknowledged.

The truth is all nations including ours act in their own self-interest
especially in frightening war times. Britain was no better or worse than America,but in truth for whatever reason it was the American military who fought alongside Australian soldiers to win victory in the pacific.

Heaven help our history.

Churchill was a idiot megalomaniac, all heroism & no sense, who would most certainly have lost the war, if Hitler had not been worse.

Given his way, Churchill would have sent all the Spitfires & Hurricanes, & even more importantly, all the men able to fly them, to France, where they would have been eliminated. It took considerable effort by many players to stop him loosing the entire RAF.

Dunkirk could not have occurred, & neither could the "Battle of Britain". The war, from our point of view, would have been over long before the Japs could have mounted a Pearl Harbour attack.

MacArthur was no better. It was the American ability to build a huge defense force, quickly, that won the war. The yanks were not much good in the early days, & neither was their equipment, but it was plentiful. They came so close to loosing in the Solomons that it wasn't funny.

The early yank gear was so bad it is almost unbelievable.

For example the Japs flew 30 Zero fighters into Lea PNG. They did receive some spare parts, but no replacement aircraft. As with our RAAF, there was quite a bit of patching together one aircraft from 3 wrecks.

By the time all thirty aircraft were destroyed they had shot down 390 American aircraft. Not a great attrition rate for the yanks, but those losses "held the fort" so to speak, while they developed the equipment to win easily, & at less cost.

Japanese military honour then prevailed. That brilliant air force detachment was left there to fight to the death as infantry, something they were not that good at.

Perhaps if the Japanese had not left small detachments to hopelessly try to defend isolated outposts all over the Pacific, MacArthur may have had more trouble "returning".

New & better weapons, & lost of them, plus better disease prevention won the Pacific war, not MacArthur. That & the US navy strategy of isolating & bypassing Japanese strength, rather than fighting for every beach as wanted by MacArthur.

Interesting that we are observing history and it's lessons.

And the truth revealed see's the international players doing what they shall, leaving Australia the perennial minion as described by Poirots original post which ever way we interpret the action of Macarthur, Churchill etc, especially when it comes to war.

It is not clear in my mind that we could be guaranteed support from the U.S, should a territorial dispute arise between Indonesia and Australia. It may be considered expedient or an international solution to allow our neighbours to unload some of their vast population into our vast expanses in the future.

Regardless, it is still ultimately and finally our responsibility to defend our own territory,
to make our decisions about our future.
Equally concepts such a profits based taxes on mining are a perfectly legitimate way of defending
the sovereignty of our nations resources from international exploitation both now and into the future.

Monies invested in taxpayer owned infrastructure such as the NBN increases our capacity to make future decisions and the retention of some
our wilderness wouldn't go astray for future generations either.

All these things are reduced by our dependence on international assistance their needs and their priorities.

The embarrassing bowing and scraping by both political sides in our country particularly towards the U.S is basically naive, a would probably make my war veteran father squirm in his seat, but then again he wouldn't say anything nice about the U.S personnel that he fought alongside in Darwin and north of it either.

Yes thinker 2, neither you or I, or anyone else can know if the US would come to our aid in any particular circumstances.

However, as I said, other countries are in the same position. Our strongest determent to attack is that any potential attacker can not know that the US won't come to our aid.

I believe we have a few decades before the deterioration in US strength reaches the stage that the threat of them coming to our aid will no longer shield us.