September 08, 2006 – Peter Stanley – All Imaginable Excuses: Australian Deserters and the Fall of Singapore

[0:00:13 Speaker 4] our guest today is Peter Stanley from the

[0:00:16 Speaker 2] Australian War Memorial in Canberra. I’m being slightly formal in my

[0:00:22 Speaker 4] introductory remarks because these sessions are now being recorded. There is a sound archives for birdie studies. I actually want to begin by pointing out that Don Davis is now the recipient of a fish rift, which has been published by the Library of Congress and is a

[0:00:43 Speaker 2] beautiful production. I’ll pass it around. Everyone will be aware of John.

[0:00:54 Speaker 4] The subject this afternoon is Thief

[0:00:57 Speaker 2] all of Singapore, one of the most controversial episodes

[0:01:02 Speaker 4] in British history, if for no other reason that Singapore was the greatest one of the greatest, if not the greatest, military defeats in British history, and it is especially interesting to be

[0:01:15 Speaker 2] able to hear the Australian perspective on all of this for reasons that will become clear. Ah, the introduction to the speaker will be given by Dr Robi Barrett. I emphasize the the Prefects doctor

[0:01:33 Speaker 4] because he is a recent recipient of a University of Texas Ph. D. And breaking a modern record. His dissertation weighed in at over 1000 pages. It had the distinction of being the longest dissertation ever written in the Department of History at the University of Texas. Robi well introduced the speaker. Would you stand

[0:02:01 Speaker 5] all of you subsequent graduate students with that 350 page limit? You can send your contributions to McKinney Texas, you know, because I’m responsible for it. Um, Peter and I have known each other for several years. We met in most unusual circumstances. I won’t call it the Black Hole of Calcutta, but it was something like a New Delhi purgatory called the Indian National Archives. We were both digging in the in the archives doing research, and my frustration was mounting because I had decided I just didn’t understand the system. And I saw this other person over there who spoke English and looked like the only other gringo there till I would ask him, You know, how? Peter had lots of experience in the archives, and we got to talking. He said, No, no, this is just how it works. It’s very difficult. Whatever you want, you can’t have and, uh, and so Peter. Then I we struck up a conversation and I said, Well, what do you do for lunch? This happens to be the bravest man I know, he said. I eat in the cafeteria of what cafeterias. He said. The cafeteria in the archives and which gave me a start. And I said, You have got to be kidding And he said, What are you doing for lunch? I said,

[0:03:14 Speaker 0] Why don’t we go

[0:03:15 Speaker 5] down to the Imperial down the street now by eso? Uh so from there I found out that Peter was the principal historian at the Australian War Memorial. He was on his way back to Canberra. I was on my way to Canberra, delayed by about three weeks beyond him, because my daughter was a fellow at a in you, and so we struck up a friendship. We got together several times there and I said, You know, you really need to come to British studies if you get an opportunity, give because I think it would fit in perfectly with the theme, and I think you really enjoy it. So he’s been in Texas for a week. We have been giving him a tour of state on Dhere. He is. Peter is his family immigrated to Australia more than 40 years ago, 45 years ago, 45 years ago, and Peter got his undergraduate degree at the Australian National University. And as he says, he was going to teach high school and decided that was a very bad idea. So he got a job with the government. From there. He has been at the archives for 2017 at the memorial for 27 years. The memorial is is a unique institution in Australia. Combines the Smithsonian, the military museums Ah, and, ah, the American History Museum, if you will. For Australia, it won. It was so consistent at winning the best museum in Australia award that they made them quit competing. Ah, and so that someone else might win it. And Peter has been there since for 27 years. And he also in the process of that promotion cycle of moving up the chain there, got his PhD, which was awarded from the Australian National University in 1993. So I’m going to turn it over to Peter on DA Let him tell us about Singapore, and I hope you enjoy it.

[0:05:23 Speaker 0] Well, Colleagues, friends, ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon. It’s a great pleasure to be here in Austin, and I would like to thank professional Roger Lewis and my friend and colleague Dr Robi Barris, for their great kindness in hosting this visit and acknowledge the friendship. And from all I’ve encountered in our few days in Texas, whenever Roby has introduced me to somebody this week, almost the first thing someone has said has to express condolences to me for the death that the not unexpected but sad death off the crocodile man, Steve Irwin. I feel almost like an informal condolence ambassador. I should have kept a list and taking it back to present to Steve Urban’s people. But I feel, though, that the people somehow expect me to begin my talk by saying, Crikey might on proceed from there. But this afternoon I do want to talk about other people, other Australians dressed in Karki shirt and shorts, Australian soldiers at the fall of Singapore. And I want to look at some of the ramifications of the fall of Singapore in February 1942 for British Australian relations in the 21st century. So this really isn’t about the full of Singapore. It’s about the significance of Singapore for Australia today. Well, of course is you know as well as I do. Singapore’s conquest by the Japanese became the defining moment in the collapse of the European empires in Southeast Asia and beyond. After the defeated Singapore, the rule of the subs or the Masters or the twins or the Bonners was doomed. The Colonial Masters defeat became the catalyst for Malaysian for Indian Singaporean nationalists who achieved Modica or independence in the following decades. But Singapore’s fall has also become a symbol for a European settler society. Australia that was already apparently an independent Dominion in 1942 in Australia is changing view of and relationship with the imperial power. So I’m interested in this question. The significance of Singapore for Australia Australia ended the way. It looks like it’s history today because of who I am and what I’m doing. So allow me to introduce both and can I apologize from my voice? I had a cold when I arrived. Although it’s got better, it still is affecting me. So if you can’t hear it, the back please wave and shout and asked me to speak up. Now the institution is, Robbie said. The institution, which I’ve worked for for 20 odd years that 27 years the Australian War Memorial is unique among the world’s war memorials. Unlike, say, the eternal flame under the Octu tree on for the Cenotaph in London or the tombs of unknown soldiers at Arlington, the Australian War Memorial isn’t just a shrine. It was conceived during the Great War, in fact, exactly 90 years ago this month as a memorial to commemorated the dead by being a museum on archival library and the center of research. And, of course, it’s a center of research where I come in as its principal. This story and I had a section of about a dozen historians who document and interpret Australia’s experience of war from European settlement in 17 88 up to the involvement of Australian forces in peacekeeping deployments and in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today and we do this, we interpret in document in a number of ways. We create museum displays, we write official histories. We speak and publish informally in all sorts of areas, including my section is responsible for the official history of peacekeeping operations from 1947 on debts being written by several of my staff working in conjunction with colleagues from the Australian National University. But I I’m not particularly interested in peacekeeping operations because I’m a pre 1945 specialist assed, Roby suggested. I’ve published on Australia’s involvement in war from the colonial period to the end of the Second World War. And while the ostensible subject of much as much of my work has been military operations, research on Gallipoli, on the war in the war, north, North Africa, Borneo, the Pacific war generally again and again my research comes back to that engine. Australian 20th century history, nationalism. Australia’s great project in the 20th century was the formation of a sense off national identity, and from Gallipoli via the Western Front to Brooke and Singapore, war has been crucial to this process. Again and again, Australians come back to thinking about their national identity by reflecting on their experience in war. Now, this national identity in Australia in the 20th century has traditionally been expressed in relation to Britain effect, which explains the centrality of Singapore to this continuing process off redefinition and reaction. Ultimately, the nationalist reaction which I’ll discuss, would propel Australia out of a British world. Indeed, if those who see Singapore in Australian nationalist terms prevail, Australia’s only relevance to British studies. It soon will be historical. Now Singapore’s central, I think, in two ways. First, the experience of participating in British wars as a colony as a self governing Dominion and is increasingly assured independent nation has shifted Australia’s perceptions of itself and of Britain. The failure of British strategy in Southeast Asia in 1942 jolted many Australians out of their complacent acceptance off that imperial relationship. Now the extent of that change can be debated, but it seems more significant today than it did in 1942. The second implication of Singapore is that Australian writers, in looking back on 1942 have used Singapore as a fulcrum on which to leave of their own perception of Australia’s independence from Britain. The pre eminent advocate of this is Professor David Day of Latrobe University in Melbourne. He’s published several books. The great betrayal, The Politics of War and and His Views have been echoed and elaborated by popular writers. So the and they essentially espoused what I would describe as a retrospective nationalist view, and it’s now dominant in Australian academic and popular historical circles. The fall of Singapore as the Australian Prime Minister John Curtain said on the very next day signalled the start of what he called a battle for Australia. And that phrase battle for Australia, I think, has become crucial not just in understanding 1942 but even more in understanding our view off 1942. So John Curtain in February 1942 talks about the opening of a battle for Australia, and I think we need to be quite clear about the setting of curtains. Statement. On the 16th of February 1942 he issued a statement which appeared in the newspapers in which he said the fall of Singapore can only be described as Australia’s done Kirk. He foresaw that that on this battle for Australia, dependence, he said, depends not merely in the face of this commonwealth but also the frontier off the United States of America and indeed the fate of the English speaking world. So you can see that John Curtains view the prime minister’s view off the battle to come. He thought the whole fate of the Western world hinged upon the events early in 1942 within the Australian region this understandable interest, of course, but it was a prediction, and I think it was so wide of the mark that we should immediately recognize it for what it waas a statement in anticipation At a time of grave crisis, John Kirton looked forward to an event that he feared would occur. In fact, as it turned out, there was no battle for Australia in any meaningful sense. It was not adopted as a battle on her. It was not identified by the official historians in period izing the events that they could chronicled. It wasn’t used it all in historical discourse until the mid 19 nineties. Well, what did happen in Australia in 1942? Well, the Japanese bombed towns and airstrips in northern Australia. They launched a submarine offensive against merchant shipping off the east coast on They sent a midget submarine raid against you, a US cruiser in Sydney Harbour as part of the diversionary strategy for the Battle of Midway in late May 1942. But except for those on, we have to regard them as minor incursions. Japanese forces made no move against mainland Australia. The Japanese and the central, a specific were defeated in Guadalcanal and in Papua New Guinea. Also, we have believed for the past 60 years that understanding is now altering, at least in Australia. So the phrase battled for Australia is increasingly becoming applied to describe the period from early 1942 to about the middle of 1943 when Australia came under the threat of a Japanese invasion. Now it’s important to understand that the Japanese did not plan such an invasion. True, allied commanders didn’t know that until about the middle of 1942. But the Japanese did not plan to invade Australia in 1942 and in fact they decided explicitly against invading Australia. However, the curtain government used that prospect of imminent invasion to mobilize the country. Kirsten encourage people toe work to fight to save, and it was one of the ways in which Australians were mobilized to prepare for this crisis to come. But then, of course, curtain MacArthur senior commanders in Australia learned that the Japanese, in fact, had decided not to invite but having banged the invasion, drum epitomised in a propaganda poster depicting a Japanese soldiers striding across the island. Swords, Australia labeled. He’s coming south having promoted this idea so assiduously in early 1942 the curtain government couldn’t then resigned from the idea partly because if they had, the Japanese would have realized that their codes had been compromised. So while the idea of a Japanese invasion was refuted in the official histories, which appeared during the 19 fifties, it has now been resurrected as a matter of widely accepted fact. So there’s a major revision going on, mostly among popular writers. Indeed, I would argue that this idea that Australia waas the the Suck, the target of a Japanese invasion has become a new, though quite groundless, orthodoxy. Well, the ultimate endorse endorsement, of course, comes from Wikipedia, which is which, like you, I use all the time. And it informs readers that the battle for Australia was a series of battles 40 1942 in early 1943 to defend Australia against Japanese attack. Now Wikipedia’s anonymous correspondent contributor at least had the grace to acknowledge that, unlike the Battle of Britain, the battle for Australia involved relatively little fighting over or near the Australian mainland, although it still includes under that rubric. All operations across northern Australia and Papa, New Guinea, but not the mainly American but even more significant Guadalcanal campaign. So you can see how Australia’s understanding of its wartime past is becoming increasingly parochial. Now it’s at this point that my current project begins in the book that I’m supposed to be writing called 1942 Battle for Australia. I’ll argue that there was no battle for Australia, and at the entire interpretation that Australia was under a really threat of invasion has skewed Australia’s understanding of the Second World War. I’m using John Curtains phrase battle for Australia as a metaphor for the battle to capture the Australian historical imagination. Those who espouse the idea that there was a battle for Australia, in my view, imposing on justifiable retrospective nationalism onto a more complex and ambiguous past. Now where the Singapore come in, we’ll Singapore is central to this argument, the logic goes, that Australian logic goes that during the 19 twenties and thirties, Britain promised Australia that placing its facing in the Singapore naval base on the Singapore strategy would ensure Australian security in the expected war with Japan. The consequent British failure to meet that undertaking because it happened to be engaged in the European war was seen at the time, in the words of John Curtains, foreign minister, as an inexcusable betrayal on this phrase, inexcusable betrayal runs right through the popular literature of Australia and Singapore. Australians feel deeply affronted that their security was jeopardized by Britain’s inexcusable betrayal in later decades the defeated Singapore and with it the capture of 22,000 Australians in Southeast Asia, one in three of whom died in captivity. That defeat is presented as one of the defining moments when Australia recognized that its interests were different to Britain’s. Now this is a matter of greater significance for Australian political and cultural historians. Asshole. It’s not just in episode in military history. It’s important in the way Australia understands its entire national history in this period. Well, let’s briefly look at the historiography before we talk about the evidence. As you know, the battle for Singapore, the full of Singapore has a rich and robust literature. In 1957 the British and Australian official histories put a formal version. Raymond Kelly guns excellent book, the worst disaster placed in, which is 1977 placed it in the context of the British Empire’s failure to meet the range of threats it would face in the Pacific war’s greatest crisis. And I wonder whether it’s significant that such were the national sensitivities, which I’ll talk about in a minute that it took an American scholar to produce the first comprehensive explanation for the fall of Singapore. Well, by the early 19 nineties, the 50th anniversary, it became clear that Australian and British writers were taking strongly national lines. The modern Australian nationalist reading of Singapore takes its cue from its most prominent exponents, Paul Keating, who was the Australian Labor Party prime minister from 1991 to 1996. This is a key moment in Australia’s an interpretation of Singapore soon after assuming the leadership of the Labour Party and prime ministership In December 1991 Keating declared in a seemingly impromptu outburst in parliament that Britain betrayed Australia. At Singapore, he accused Britain of having deserted Australia and denounced the conservative, liberal and national parties as British to the bootstraps. They were, he said, the same old fogeys who doffed their lids and tug the forelock. So the British establishment. But this was no impromptu outburst because the next day, Heating confirmed that he had indeed been quite clear about what he wanted to say. So it was quite a calculated interpretation off that episode in Australian history. One of my former students then went on to write a book about prime ministerial rhetoric about Australia’s history, and he is dissected John Keating Paul Keating’s speeches. And he observes that there was nothing novel in Keating’s irritation over the fall of Singapore and its implications for Australian independence. But it was novel for an Australian prime minister to give voice to that degree off anger at Australia’s inexcusable betrayal. And James current places Keating’s 1992 rhetoric within an Australian radical nationalist strand of thought that has moved from the Australian Irish left wing. The margins of Australian politics increasingly into the mainstream and, as it turns out, not just in the mainstream labour but in the mainstream of Australian politics as a whole. As I’ll make clear. Indeed, the popular belief that Singapore made a nation, as Keating said, seems to have been accepted universally. It has become a new orthodoxy, and I think the test of this I could give you many examples, but let me give you one example a retired army colonel not known as a radical bunch addressing a meeting off Australians for a constitutional monarchy. So a conservative group concerned to defeat the referendum proposals of 1999 which sought to make Australia a Republican proposals which were defeated. And this retired colonel asked his fellow constitutional monarchists when when did Nation would arrive in Australia? And the answer he gave the answer, which they apparently agreed with was that Singapore was the one defining event that may have thrust nationhood upon us. So Anglo Australian conservative sentiment is losing is fighting a losing battle to this widespread assumption about Singapore. And it’s against that general understanding that we need to see the challenge to the growing orthodoxy that emerged after Keating speech back to the his story. Ah, graffiti In the succeeding decade in the decade after the 50th anniversary through the 19 nineties, scholarship moved on 2002 saw Alan Warren’s book Singapore 1942. It was written by an Australian, but from a British point of view, and its main contribution was to buck the trend towards national boosting and vilification, which so disfigured the 1992 anniversary, he didn’t choose to to pick up the easy targets. Insipid Bombay Bloom of British kernels. Alan Warren’s astringent account devoted special attention to the Indian army, the largest single of element in the British Empire forces but one that is usually either overlooked or blamed for the defeat. Australians are great blame er’s, and they essentially blame the Indians for letting the side down. But Singapore? Well, Alan Warren didn’t accept that. Two years later, Carl Hacking Kevin Blackburn published Did Singapore have to fall? And it dealt with Churchill and the impregnable fortress of the supposedly impregnable fortress. They, too, were not satisfied with simply repeating tired old myths about guns facing the wrong way. On DPA, Kasab’s taking Tiffin in tropical messes. They grappled with the reasons for the Singapore strategy on the realities of defending imperial possessions and allies at a time of growing uncertainty. Very, very much pragmatic account Well, bookshelves now are full of big books by historians. One of the larger examples is Cameron Forbes’s book Hellfire, published in 2005 and this this now I think, defines the Australian popular orthodoxy about Singapore. Cameron Forbes, the author like many journalists, historians is better at conveying the stories of the individuals involved in explaining the big picture. His account of Churchill and Curtain and John Curtains clash around the time of the full of Singapore reflects the one eyed orthodoxy, which now prevails in Australia. Forbes puts what’s become the conventional Australian view of the Japanese threat in December 1941 and I’ll quote of it from it in leaving Singapore are false Fortress Britain had undermined Australia’s security. The ghost of the Gallipoli blunder walked the Malayan Peninsula. Churchill Sense of proportion was skewed, putting the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Russia ahead of the Pacific. Now let me declare my hand here by observing that since there was desperate fighting in North Africa and Malta, not least Russia in December 1941 German tanks, after all, were in the suburbs of Moscow. That concentration on those theaters to me seems reasonably sensible. In December 1941 Australian troops had not even entered action against the Japanese, So Cameron Forbes clearly wants to put all the eggs in the Australian basket and really not care about the broader aspects of the conduct of the War of the Allied War effort. Contrast Cameron Forbes rather parochial approach with the another book published by another journalist in the same year, Colin Smith, another marathon storyteller, published Singapore Burning about the same time calling Smith’s book is also journalists history. It’s based on deep research, and it reads well, especially in telling stories of those involved. But the point is, it’s pretty much evenhanded. Singapore burning won’t tell you very much this new, but its hallmark is that it reflects the growing international ism off British accounts. In contrast to the growing nationalism Australian works, you can see where I’m going here. I have to notice a couple of off other serious books so that we could get a complete picture off the historiography of Singapore and talk about Guns of February by the Layton and very much more Henry Frye, which was published posthumously in 2004. Henry Henry was a Swiss who is an authority on Japan’s southward advance, as he called it, so no one could accuse him of partiality. For the first time, he was able to evoke the experience, the attitudes on the feelings off the faceless Japanese soldiers who captured Singapore for the Emperor Fry’s book Implicit exemplifies the greatest subtlety off recent scholarly accounts, which are breaking away from a simple national bias. And I have to notice the Canadian Brian Farrell, professor in military history at the National University of Singapore, who recently published The Defense and Fall of Singapore 1940 42. It deals with the experience off all the contending national groups, not just those in the hectic weeks before Japanese tanks rumbled along Orchard Road and into Fullerton Square. But it also deals with the crucial decades of years before the Japanese call Britain’s bluff in Asia. Brian Farrell doesn’t often a minute dissection of the vagaries of the Singapore strategy, but he does show how the inescapable realities of a two

[0:26:00 Speaker 6] front war

[0:26:01 Speaker 0] calls on the fleet in north in European waters and a need for a fleet in Asian waters unable to satisfy both have those inescapable realities of a two front war made the successful defence of Sling of Singapore slide from increasingly unlikely to absolutely impossible. The last scholarly treatment I want to talk about his Christopher Bailey and Tim Harper’s forgotten armies. The fall off British Asia 1941 42 a very recent book on They canvass the Causes, the Course and the consequences off Britain’s Defeat and recovery in South and Southeast Asia. Their great strength is that they present the story from a British perspective supposedly British perspectives but that are not purely white. They integrate the impact of conquest and liberation on indigenous protect Proton nations. I think I’ll call off the British Empire, adding dimensions often overlooked in conventional Anglo or Australian centric accounts. So as you can see the historical story, Ah Griffey of Singapore is evolving. The battle of Singapore continues. But what I think we can see is a welcome international perspective, joining the traditional nationalism off the earlier accounts. Except that national identification and feeling, as exemplified by Cameron Forbes’s work, remains central to the Australian reading of Singapore. Popular his nationalist histories like Cameron Forbes made great play of Churchill’s supposed betrayal of Australia. Um, now the 50th anniversary off the surrender in 1992 sora controversy over many over claims that many Australian soldiers had deserted before the surrender on those allegations, which are crucial to understanding Australia’s attitude towards Singapore will form the substance of my discussion of Singapore on what it now means for Australia. Well, what are these claims of deserters and what is their substance? And why should Australians be so concerned about them? What’s the significance for Australia? Sense of national identity and its relationship to India? Well, first, some brief historical background for those who may not be entirely familiar with the events of February 1942. The Japanese had attacked Malaya on the eighth of December, actually an hour and 40 minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor. But a day later because of the international Dateline and as you well know, they advanced swiftly down the Malayan Peninsula at flanking, demoralizing and defeating British Indian and in January 1942 Australian troops. By the end of January 42 they had fallen back onto Singapore Island, which they expected to hold as a fortress, hoping for relief to come. That relief, of course, of course, did not come a week later. In about the eighth of February, the Japanese launched their attack on Singapore Island. They crossed the narrow Johore Strait at night. The important thing is, and something that Australians don’t often like people to know is that the Japanese attacks fell on to Australian brigades holding the northeast sector off the island’s defenses over several days fighting and it waas horrific fighting. But they broke through and pushed the Australian defenders towards the city. Once the Japanese reach Singapore irons reservoirs, there was no water for this large city in a tropical climate, and General Arthur Percival, the British commander, realized the game was up. So on the 14th of January, he made terms of the Japanese General your master, and accepted, uh, accepted an unconditional surrender. The figures. I think you’re a bit rubbery, but about 100,000 British Empire troops were surrendered, including 40,000 Indians and 15,000 Australians. This humiliation second only to Dunkirk. Perhaps more significant for Dunkirk, the prisoners who were captured endured appalling captivity like Americans captured in the Philippines, of course, in which disease, starvation, overwork and brutality and the inadvertent torpedoing of prisoners by American submarines killed one man in three and more than two and three of the Indians who refused to join the Indian National Army. And I think we must bear in mind the ordeal of prisons of the Japanese colors Australia’s understanding off its war in the Pacific. Well, the British, of course, having seen this imperial fortress fall so swiftly, eso unexpectedly sort explanations for the disaster. And in the months after Singapore’s

[0:30:22 Speaker 6] full

[0:30:23 Speaker 0] British staff officers at New Delhi, the Southeast Asia commands, we came South East Asia Command’s headquarters compiled. But what wasn’t what became known as the Wavell Report because Archibald Wavell was the British commander in chief in Southeast Asia during the campaign the Wave will report makes very interesting reading because it’s clearly create. It is clearly written within perfect evidence, and it focuses very much on I would argue peripheral issues, but one of the things that it that it identifies was, and I’ll quote, large numbers of Australian stragglers were seen in the town while the events of the night of the 8th 9th February seemed to have destroyed completely their discipline and morale. The Wavell report essentially argued that the Australians had given way and that many Australians, thousands of Australians, had left the front line had gone back into Singapore town, where they became undisciplined, where they became

[0:31:17 Speaker 8] a, um uh

[0:31:21 Speaker 0] yeah that I made a nuisance of themselves. Now the problem is, and I’ll go on about that later. The Wave will report, though, wasn’t seen by Australians at the time, and it lay unseen in the archives, or at least unused by the official historians until it was revealed 50 years later, when British archives, of course, were opened. The first writer to reveal the existence of the Wavell report was a master Mariner turned writer known as Peter Elphick, author off Singapore. The Pregnant Will Fortress, one of the worst titles I’ve ever heard that pregnant voters. Elphick first exposed these claims to Australian readers early in 1993 although the book wasn’t actually published in 1995. But it meant that there was ferment about this book in the press for several years, Elphick used the wave will report to state that, and he said the Australians did not pull their weight in Singapore. Indeed, he considered that Australians were mainly responsible for Singapore’s collapse. Elphick appears to perpetuate those national fishes among writers of at the battle, and I think he waas, taking essentially British line and anti Australian line on Australians, reacted vigorously as you would you would expect. L fix claims about what he called the desert of situation aroused predictably outrage, denunciation and denial. Newspapers both broadsheet and tabloid and talk back radio hosts especially hotly contested the veracity off l fix claims. A typical headline in the newspapers read Digger Cowardice, blamed for defeated Singapore Digger is the nickname applied to Australian soldiers and that appeared in the most high brow of the national newspapers. So you can imagine what the tabloid press made of this. The camera times, which I have to say is a very fine newspaper headed its story. British report brands World War two diggers, cowards, rapists and looters. So you can see I was not being honest, and I said they made a nuisance of themselves. This was 1/3 disgrace. If you believe the wave will report, well, l fix book appeared at exactly the same moment was when Paul Keating’s nationalist rhetoric was inviting Australians to reconsider the place of Singapore in the conception of national identity. So you can see the two things have come together. A nationalist prime minister, an anniversary which stimulates a reaction because critics have impunity, the honor and efficiency and courage Australian soldiers. Now I have to take a very brief detail here and say that the word that is used in the Wavell report and in all the the the public city was deserted. And I think we need to take a close look at that. That word, because as many of you would expect here, deserters I would regard a deserter is a person who leaves the front line deliberately in order to escape who seeks to evade their duty. I think we could also use the word stragglers people, men who were disoriented, who leave combat, confused or lost. But deserters was always the word look used, and in the end, I don’t think it matters because I distract both stragglers and deserters are not in the front line fighting. And it’s the expectation that Australians, of course, would be in the frontline fighting, which underpins the Australian reaction. Well, what reaction? One of the most vociferous rebuttals came in the splendidly title book, Cruel Britannia. Pretend You’re Waves. The Rules, which was already that again. It’s a wonderful title. Cruel Britannia. Britannia waves the rules. It’s pretty, a polemic on a very fierce polemic by two survivors of both the fall of Singapore and of captivity under the Japanese. So these were two men who are regarded as having every right to speak Ray Connelly and Bob Wilson. And, of course, they were outraged by what they saw as a bogus document. Their anger at the Wavell report was because it is a really painful experience. They wrote to hear your valiant dead comrades spoken off in this manner, and they regarded. The report is based on lies or distortions collected from a group of British malcontents. You can see the battle lines lining up here and the Japanese, and not on one side or another. The Japanese are observing this. This is a fight between Australia and Britain at best, Connelly and Wilson conceded. While it is true that some Australians were drunk and brawling and determined to escape, most men absent from the units were unwitting absentees. What I just described the stragglers and they said they numbered less than 20 in 1000 were less than 29,000 get you about 45 men or something so clearly there’s a you can see how the two sides are lining up Elphick saying this. Thousands of Australian deserters and stragglers, and Ray Connelly and Bob Wilson claimed that this 50 well, the argument over the wave will report reflected not just what happened in 1942 but what Australians half a century on, felt about what was the most contentious episode in imperial military history on what they felt about the image of Australians, Australians own image off their soldiers. Reputation on the argument goes on. 13 years on from those initial headlines in a website which has only just been released, Australian partisans notice will be a tenacious non institutional historian called the Net Silver are still defending Australia’s honor. So Lynette Silver concludes her long, detailed defense rebuttal of this as 50 years on the eighth Australian division had indeed become scapegoats for the bloody empire. So this is the sort of language people using about this case. And the problem is, of course, that their contributions to this debate are seriously colored by the sense of nationalism. And the problem is, is that the evidence shows that Elphick actually is right. The Wavell report appears to reflect reality much more than do Lynette Silver or those two veterans, and in fact, the evidence has always been available documents in the public domain in the Australian war Memorial that substantially corroborate l fix claims well, the Australian official history of the period covering the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia. The Japanese thrust appeared in 1957 as did the relevant British volume. But neither the Australian author, a journalist, Lionel Wigmore, nor his British counterpart, Brigadier, would burn. Kirby dealt in any detail with the claims that Australians or any competence had deserted in large numbers. Nor did they refer to the Wavell report, although it seems both were aware of it. So the allegations over desserts that Singapore has always been a sensitive subject on the official historians dealt with it by not dealing with it. But if you look at the papers of Lionel Wigmore, the Australian official historian, you’ll find that it contains extensive correspondence with senior Australian and other officers. Some of the problems of writing that volume because it dealt with the defeats and the disasters of 1942 was that much of the expected official records, orders, signals reports, often witnesses were missing, and the defeat made all involved sensitive about their reputations. So Lionel Wigmore correspondents were anxious to renovate both the historical record but also to renovate their reputations. And the relationship was complicated because George Gordon Bennett, the commander of the Australians on Singapore, the eighth Strain division, was widely hated within his own formation. The fact that few of his informants trouble to hide on even Mawr. He knew that aggrieved individuals, including Gordon Bennett, would sue for definition for defamation should the officially story and make incautious disclosures, however, sadly, they were based. In fact, under Australian defamation law, it doesn’t matter if something’s true. If it’s defamatory, large damages could be awarded as a result. Lionel Wigmore pulled his punches. It’s very clear in comparing the text of his drafts, his correspondence on the published text that he moderated his conclusions very substantially. And the deserter situations, Peter Elphick called it, demonstrates This. In line with most correspondents are letters from Colonel John Fire, who was Gordon Bennett’s chief administrative officer, the officer responsible for the administration off the Australian troops in Malaya, Singapore. And he wrote to Wigmore in 1940 52 to comment on the manuscript of what became the Japanese threat. The thrust, discussing the extent of straggling as he called it among the Australians on Singapore In the week before the surrender, Fire admitted this the digger soldier, the digger was very much disgraced in Singapore. At the end, the perimeter was men by only a proportion of the force. The remainder were in funk holes, huddling with natives on the seafront, drunk in cafes. Don’t forget the episode of the Empire Star Stranglers or deserters. Take your pick. Many described as Australians forced their way aboard the Empire, the Lina Lina Empire Star among civilian evacuees and wounded, and this event is widely documented both in primary and secondary sources. It certainly widely documented by Peter Elphick. Although it didn’t get into the Australian official history, Lionel Wigmore decided to omit sensitive and embarrassing episodes. So while they differ on details and especially numbers, the contemporary sources abundantly substantiate. Fires view the War Diary of the Divisional Military Police company, for example, recorded on the 14th of February, the debut for the surrender. More and more soldiers in Singapore, morale very low, all imaginable excuses being made to avoid returning to the line. And who could blame them? But the fact is, is that they were out of the line, not in the line, but what proportion were actually straggling or deserting. Will Fire estimated that they numbered about 7000 or about half of the Australians on the island? Neither this figure, North Eyes comment, appeared in Widmore’s history and when in 2000 to the allegations about the deserts of situation. Rickard in an ABC television documentary, Peter Elphick was interviewed and it has to be said, presenting it in a very poor light because Australians as all right as a whole and the ABC television documentary Pit Makers did not want Australians to be faced with claims, as Thigh put it that the digger was very much disgraced. So you can see how the full of Singapore confronts Australians with a problem in seeing their soldiers, who have universally regarded as efficient and courageous and and good as being very much disgraced. It sticks Australians with a problem off self image, but it actually is a relevant that the matter of the full of Singapore because the number of deserters did not really explain. Singapore’s full arguably Singapore fell because successive governments, British and Australian had since the early 19 twenties failed to think clearly about Singapore’s place in imperial defense. This is the conclusion of every account of the saga, at least since Gordon Bennett’s a self Exculpatory. Why Singapore Fell was published in 1944. Ondas. Roger Lewis, historian of Pretty Strategy in the Far East, knows better than anyone here. Singapore fell because of inadequacies in British decisions. That’s also made much of in Australia. Very few Australians have any sympathy at all For the dilemma are the imperatives that played upon the British government in deciding how Singapore should be constructed or reinforced. So Australians are really only interested in the outcome of the battle, but they’re particularly interested to renovate their reputations in that more immediately. Of course, the reason for the collapse of British imperial resistance on Singapore Island itself can be seen in divided command between a nen effective British commander, General Arthur Arthur Percival. Those dispositions and decisions during the battle were questionable, but also did Gordon Bennett, this training commanders who was at loggerheads with his brigade commanders. It was an abrasive personality who could not get on with person with Arthur Percival, made bad decisions and really contributed to the failure off his own troops on Singapore. That, too, didn’t come out very clearly in the official history in 1957 although it has been exposed in Brett Lodges book The Fall of Gordon Bennett. And now everyone accepts that. No, that’s not true. And now those who investigated may accept that Australians were responsible for that collapse in the line. Um so in a sense, British critics such as Peter Elphick, a right Australians, were arguably responsible for allowing the Japanese to seize the island’s reservoirs reservoirs, which made capitulation inevitable. And the presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of disoriented and leaderless men behind the lines, irrespective of whether they’re engaged in acts of indiscipline, is therefore largely irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. Has to say Singapore was lost in the financial pairing of the Treasury in London between the wars or in the minds of the defenders commanders during the battle. The the deserted question really isn’t that central. But the controversy is highly central, is highly relevant to the Australian understanding of its image and its relationship to Britain in the final decades of the 20th century and into the present century, seemingly across an ideological spectrum across generations and across political allegiance. Australians increasingly venerate those who served in the Second World War, and we can judge this in many ways from the tone and the number off these populist history books that are appearing the numbers who attend the annual ANZAC Day commemoration, marches and services in towns right across the nation. Um, Australians want to believe in their troops in war time. They want to believe that they did well on all occasions. They want to believe that the finest fighting men that the world has seen and evidence about deserters and stragglers in Singapore directly challenges that. Let me give you an exact an instance of the type of rhetoric which is applied. One of the very recent populist book called Tobruk, about the siege of Tobruk in North Africa 1941 has been written by a sporting journalist. Peter Fits Simon’s. In it. He extols Australia’s courage and endurance in holding this North African port through 1941 against the Italians and the Germans, and he denigrates the British for the ineffectual command in North Africa. Even though the siege was a success. And here is the terms in which he describes the British. He attacks what he calls pommy puffed officers. Ah, bunch of Willie Wolfe. Tres now, to appreciate exactly how offensive that is, you need a grasp of homophobic Australian slang, but you probably get the idea. It’s typical of the tone off populist criticism of Britain on amongst those most highly regarded veterans among, of all the veterans Australians venerate. Those who survived 3.5 years of captivity under the Japanese are amongst the most most revered. Australia’s don’t want to hear that Australians were capable of leaving their place is in the forefront of battle, and especially that these men let the side down. They do not countenance claims by British authors based on British sources, that these men behaved as men will under the stress of battle. These things happened, but Australians don’t want to recognize him now. I’m arguing that it’s clear now that that 1992 anniversary in the 1993 controversy over the Wavell report marks a decisive point in Australia’s understanding of its history. It marks the shift, my lack of interest in the Pacific war to embracing 1942 and the Japanese threat as the focus off the entire war. Most importantly, the anniversary of the fall of Singapore marked a fulcrum of popular understanding in which Australians across generations and political spectrums changed their minds about these events and the significance. I’m arguing that as a whole, Australians abandoned the traditional respect and sympathy for Britain. They now explicitly deprecate Britain’s part in the Second World War, and they generally boost their own experience unduly. They see the fall of Singapore, as John Curtain put it as the beginning of a battle for Australia. So it seems that the full of Singapore has opened a battle for Australia in the sense that it now forms the basis off a parochial E Australian understanding of its past and its relationship to Britain. So what’s the current state of debate just to close? The idea of a battle for Australia is, it seems now erotically entrenched in popular memory. Australia Post The Post office issued stamps marking a battle for Australia anniversary in September 19 in 2002. Now, in the first week of September, commemorative ceremonies are held in state capitals and in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial. Although the memorials director doesn’t agree with the idea of it being elevated to being a national day. It makes the politics between the memorial, the bureaucracy, the executive and particularly the governor general’s office particularly sensitive. I’m glad I left the country for it, actually, because I may have to apply for asylum. But just today I received an email from a colleague at work who just said that the on Wednesday the governor general, Major General Michael Michael Jeffrey, describe the battle for Australia as a four year struggle against Japan’s efforts to invade Australia. You can see how dramatically that changes occurred now. The governor general could make those sort of statements, and nobody seems to mind. So accept May. When I published articles last year arguing that Australians exaggerate the crisis of 1942 and in contesting the parochialism of that approach, I attracted virulent criticism Privately in newspaper correspondents, columns and on talk back radio people demanded that I be dismissed from my position and challenge my citizenship on my loyalty to Australia. But this paper isn’t about me. It’s about the significance of those contending ideas in shaping on understanding of Australia’s past last April. In the days preceding exact day, a new player entered the debate. Stephen Barton is a tutor. I think you call him a teaching fellow at Edith Cowan University in Perth and he contributed an opinion piece to the Australian newspaper He Arguedas. I had argued that the Japanese threat has been exaggerated in popular mythology. On the response to his piece was Savage. Leader of the opposition Kim Beazley decried Barton’s attempts to take 1942 out of the Australian legend. Officials of the influential returned and services leave. The National Veterans Organization denounced part and claiming that he had denigrated the memory and sacrifice of those who fought the Japanese. In an interview on the Australian at the ABC current current affairs programme Late Line, the normally urbane and rational Tony Jones attacked bottom. Surely there was a role for nationalism at a time when Australia was under direct threat of invasion that don’t Jones demanded. And this is exactly the number. The argument, increasingly Australian see a role for nationalism in historical understanding. The fall of Singapore has become a decisive point in the development of a nationalist interpretation of Australian history. It explicitly denies that Australia is apart off the British world. That nationalist view does not countenance a disinterested view or Britain’s part in the disaster, nor an honest treatment of the desert of situation in Singapore, nor a balanced view off the battle for Australia in rejecting. You’re not even wanting to hear a disinterested account of their military history, Australians and employ all imaginable excuses just like the stragglers on Singapore Island. This time the battle for Australia, Israel on Australian seeking a dispassionate understanding of their history are, it seems, losing that battle to thank you, I look forward to your comments and questions