[Bob Wurth]

SAVING AUSTRALIA BOOK REVIEWS CAN BE FOUND BELOW ON THIS PAGE.

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WALKLEY AWARD: Saving Australia - long listed in the 2006 Walkley Non-Fiction Award: "A journey into the remarkable wartime relationship between Australia’s World War II Prime Minister, John Curtin, and the first Japanese minister to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai."
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SMH NEWS - MIDGET SUB DISCOVERY STIRS GHOSTS OF THE PAST

The book Saving Australia described the midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour on the night of May 31, 1942, and its aftermath, including the return of the ashes of four of the six submariners to Japan by the Japanese ambassador, Tatsuo Kawai.

Now the third midget submarine which was manned by two submariners, Ban and Ashibe, has been discovered off Sydney's northern beaches, and discussions are underway between Japan and Australia about what to do with any remains aboard.

For major coverage of this discovery of the missing midget submarine M-24, the reactions of the brothers of the two submariners in Japan and the delicate consultations between Japan and Australia over the wreck, please see Bob Wurth's articles in the Sydney Morning Herald of Wednesday, December 13, 2006,or visit:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/12/12/1165685679686.html

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ALSO READ: SECRET PAPERS REVEAL BIZARRE SEQUEL TO MIDGET SUB RAID - Exclusive sequel by Bob Wurth via ninemsn on the Sydney Harbour raid by Japanese midget submarines. For the first time, the story of the Australian operation to drop the remains of Japanese war dead over New Guinea is revealed. Go to bottom of page.

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WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN TRAVEL FEATURE ON MANAZURU:

For the story of diplomat Tatsuo Kawai's retreat, the fishing village of Manazuru in Japan, please see "The Japanese Riviera" and "The dark side of Manazuru" by Bob Wurth in the travel section of the Weekend Australian, November 25-26, 2006. The Weekend Australian featured articles on both modern day Manazuru, and the Manazuru of Kawai's era. See:

www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20810622-5002031,00.html
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SAVING AUSTRALIA BOOK REVIEW OCTOBER 2006 ISSUE OF AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW (ABR), by historian David Day, author of many books, including 'John Curtin, a life':

"It is the relationship between Kawai and Curtin that Bob Wurth examines in his richly textured book, Saving Australia."

Here is an edited summary of the ABR Review:


"As Opposition leader, Curtin was pursuing the same ultimate aim in Australia of averting a Pacific war. With the concurrence of the government, he had repeated talks with the newly arrived Japanese representative, the propagandist and sometime poet, Tatsuo Kawai. It is the relationship between Kawai and Curtin that Bob Wurth examines in his richly textured book, Saving Australia, Curtin's secret peace with Japan."....

"Wurth's book would have been much slimmer had he restricted its focus to the talks between Curtin and Kawai. However, he has ranged much wider to paint an absorbing picture of Japanese activities in Australia during the early years of the war, as their diplomatic and commercial representatives attempted to court the favour of Australian business and political leaders. Wurth regales his readers with tales of diplomats plying garrulous Australian politicians with alcohol and having their Australian chauffeur take them on a tour to inspect the vital BHP steelworks and its defences at Newcastle. Apart from the espionage and the socialising, Wurth also explores the emotional life of Kawai, who had become besotted with a young Japanese-American woman whom he had met in Tokyo..."

ABR at good bookshops or subscribe:

www.australianbookreview.com.au
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QUADRANT MAGAZINE & THE WRITING OF THE SAVING AUSTRALIA HISTORY: For Bob Wurth's tongue-in-cheek story of the writing of Saving Australia, see 'Straying on to Hallowed Gound' in the September 2006 (Vol. no. 9) edition of Quadrant Magazine. An extract...

"I am, you see, an unapologetic member of the growing but small band of history writers in Australia who do not hail from an academic hall, yet all the same outrageously presume to have something useful to add to the history of our nation .... The first real shock during my research was the discovery of the base personal level of snarling, sniping vitriol employed by some academic historians aimed at anyone who presumes to write on history who might not be in complete concord with their considered views on Australia’s history. "

Quadrant Magazine - available from good newsagents or by subscription: www.quadrant.org.au

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JAPANESE AMBASSADOR TO CANBERRA ON SAVING AUSTRALIA:
"YOUNGER GENERATION SHOULD KNOW MORE ABOUT JAPAN
AND AUSTRALIA AT WAR" -

(See bottom of page for full report.)
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SAVING AUSTRALIA DEBATED IN THE AUSTRALIAN SENATE -

"THE MINISTER HAS GROSSLY MISREPRESENTED
BOB WURTH'S EXCELLENT BOOK.." -

(See bottom of page for report.)

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SUMMARY OF SAVING AUSTRALIA BOOK REVIEWS TO DATE:

Australian Book Review: "...richly textured book..."

Sydney Morning Herald: "...an extraordinary book..."

West Australian: "...important contribution to the history of our darkest hours..."

The Bulletin: "...reshape the way historians view the war."

Canberra Times: "Intriguing, thoroughly researched, easy to read."

The Age: "...study of a country at war..."

ABC Online (Articulate): "...fascinating and poignant..."

The Weekend Australian: "...I am not convinced."

Courier Mail: "...Wurth succeeds."

Herald Sun: "Saving Australia is a compelling but disturbing account of a nation woefully unprepared for war..."

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THE SAVING AUSTRALIA BOOK REVIEWS:



Herald Sun, Melbourne, Weekend section, Saturday July 15, 2006.


A war-torn friendship

By GREG THOM

SAVING AUSTRALIA: CURTIN'S SECRET PEACE WITH JAPAN
by Bob Wurth
Lothian Books, rrp. $34.95


VIEWED through the prism of 21st-century historical hindsight, war between Australia and Japan looked unavoidable in the dark days leading up to World War II.

That didn't stop individuals from both sides desperately trying to avoid conflict, right up to the dropping of the first bombs.

Chief among them were Prime Minister John Curtin and Japan's first ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai.

Though both fiercely patriotic and loyal to the conflicting aims of their own nations, a remarkable friendship developed between the two that started long before the first shots were fired.

Both men used this bond to try to forestall the approaching armageddon.
Curtin's sterling role as wartime leader has been well documented, but the meticulous research of Brisbane-based writer Bob Wurth has unearthed in fascinating detail the genuine affection and mutual respect that developed between two men from vastly different cultures, under the most difficult of circumstances.

So much so, there is evidence Kawai may have given advance warning, though in a circumspect manner, of the approaching Japanese strike to Curtin days before the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor.

In peeling back the layers surrounding Kawai, Wurth paints a contradictory picture of a man equally capable of displaying dedicated pacifism and inexplicably protecting war criminals under his own roof.
An at times strident nationalist who nevertheless came to believe Japan's expansionist warmongering policy was ill-conceived, Kawai without doubt loved Australia and its people.

Perhaps Kawai's attitude to Australia is best summed up long after he left our shores and returned to his home in Japan.

``I have not forgotten your country and I have never forgotten John Curtin,'' he said.

For those living in the secure comfort of modern Australia, Saving Australia is a compelling but disturbing account of a nation woefully unprepared for war and consumed with its own survival.

Photo caption: Respect: PM John Curtin (far left) and Japanese ambassador Tatsuo Kawai (left) formed a remarkable friendship.
Cover of book.

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Canberra Times, Panorama book reviews, June 10, 2006.
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"This is an intriguing book, thoroughly researched and easy to read, that will force its readers to think hard about friendship and public duty."

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Japan's harbour attack twists in bizarre links for friendship

Reviewed: Michael McKernan.

On May 31, 1942, six young men submerged off Sydney wrote their last letters. They were about to enter three midget submarines with the task of causing mayhem in Sydney Harbour. Within hours four would be dead. One submarine escaped. But before that the harbour would come alive with searchlights and warships on patrol, and 21 Australian sailors on the Sydney ferry Kuttabul would die after the ferry was torpedoed.

Watching the action from the balcony of Admiralty House, Kirribilli, was Australia's Governor General, Lord Gowrie, and his wife Zara. "We couldn't actually see the submarines", Gowrie reported to the King, "But we could see the small craft buzzing about dropping depth charges and searchlights moving all over the surface of the water."

Just a few weeks earlier Lady Gowrie had been advised by Sir John Latham, former Australian representative in Tokyo, about to resume his post as Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, that Japan's senior representative in Japan, Tatsuo Kawai, wanted to send her a gift.

Kawai was under house arrest in Melbourne with all of his Japanese staff, awaiting repatriation to Japan. Yet in peacetime he had promised Lady Gowrie a bonsai pine and now he wanted to make good his promise. "Trees are international," she wrote to Latham in delight, and she would accept the kind gift, "I shall not even ask a higher authority."

She asked Latham to thank Kawai because she did not think a letter of her own would get through. Nor would the bonsai pine. A higher authority, in the person opf the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, intervened and ruled against the gift.

There were 20,000 Australians in captivity after the fall of Singapore and they were about to experience some of the worst and most degraded captivity that prisoners of war had ever known, and the Japanese were sinking ships off the east coast of Australia and had entered Sydney Harbour to kill Australian sailors.

And Zara Gowrie, remarkably, had agreed to accept a gift from an interned Japanese national who had played a part in providing the intelligence that would guide the submarines into the harbour. Was she mad?

This book is a study in the tension between the obligations of private friendship and public duty. Bob Wurth, a journalist with extraordinary academic capacities - his footnotes are as detailed and thorough as any I have seen in a long time - does not have her in his sights in exploring this tension. It is the Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, H.V. "Doc" Evatt, and Prime Minister John Curtin, whose friendship with Kawai he wishes to investigate.

Kawai seems to have a genuine genius for friendship. Evatt, we know from so many sources, never seems to have trusted people other than the close family circle and one or two real intimates. Curtin had few political friends and in moments of the greatest difficulty in the war turned to Lord Gowrie who became confidant and counsellor. Yet both of them, separately, found something so attractive in Kawai that they soon regarded him as a close friend. Evatt allowed him extraordinary liberties in the days when war with Japan seemed increasingly likely, and even after war broke out. Evatt seems to have believed in the last days of the peace that somehow he and Kawai might broker an Australian settlement with Japan that might avert the coming war.

Curtin never quite went that far but he gave Kawai special access to him and opened his mind and heart to him.

How does Wurth explain this strange turn of events? In part through his account of the attractive personality of Kawai. Wurth journeys to Kawai's
place of spiritual renewal, his holiday home at Manazuru, still intact, in peace and tranquillity, and finds there the spirit of the cultured diplomat, who, throughout his life, wrote, in brief verse, a narrative of events as they happened. Well and good, I suppose, but the book provides no conclusive answer to just what it was that made Kawai such a sympathetic character.

Friendship, I think Wurth is saying, is ultimately unfathomable.

Perhaps we need to go to the naivety, stupidity and vanity of the Australians to account for Kawai's hold over them. These are not words that would normally be used in any study of Curtin, and to be fair, he fades out of the narrative once war has been declared.

In an absorbing epilogue, Wurth suggests that Curtin gave Kawai a great deal more than he received from the friendship. Curtin showed him spiritual qualities in his own character which, because they were so attractive, Kawai embraced in a life-changing reorientation. Naivety, stupidity and vanity are words, though, that people have used of Evatt, and it will be the reader who measures out what weight to give each in judging Evatt's relationship with Kawai, as Wurth leaves us, to some extent, guessing. Evatt matured as a minister, Wurth suggests, as the war progressed and he details the strength Evatt brought to discussions of the rights of small nations by the end of the war. Paradoxically, too, Evatt had become virulently anti-Japanese.

This is an intriguing book, thoroughly researched and easy to read, that will force its readers to think hard about friendship and public duty. I tossed and turned on this one, not quite accepting that the Australians had done too much wrong, though perhaps too trusting of a man whose motivation in 1941 and 1942 is still not entirely clear.

I cannot accept the book's sub-title though, "Curtin's secret peace with Japan", because it wasn't and this is not what this book is about anyway. But it was naive, stupid and vain of Zara Gowrie to think that she could accept a present in friendship from Kawai, then a security risk and still the representative of an aggressive and darkly menacing foe.

And she was only a bit player in the story.

DR MICHAEL MCKERNAN IS A CANBERRA HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR.

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Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday June 14, 2006.

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"...an extraordinary book about a remarkable period of history..."

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TIME FOR APPEASEMENT WAS OVER

Tony Stephens, reviewer

June 14, 2006

Curtin and Japan's man in Australia were close, but the PM was ready to fight.



Australia had been at war with Japan for more than four months in 1942 when Tatsuo Kawai, Japan's first minister to Australia, wrote to Sir John Latham, the Chief Justice, to say he was sending two Japanese dwarf pine trees, one for the Lathams and one for Lady Zara Gowrie, the Governor-General's wife. Zara Gowrie wrote from Admiralty House at Kirribilli that she "should be delighted to accept".

At the same time, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese fleet, was meeting commanders of the midget submarines planning an attack on Sydney Harbour. The Australian Government ruled that "it would be quite inappropriate for Her Excellency to receive such a gift". The trees were not delivered; the war proceeded, in all its horror.

Bob Wurth has written an extraordinary book about a remarkable period of history, focusing on the relations between Kawai and John Curtin, the then prime minister, and other prominent Australians, such as High Court judge Owen Dixon.

The book has reopened debate about Curtin's standing. Admirers rate him among the very best prime ministers, largely for the way in which he prosecuted the war. Opponents believe he was an appeaser for much of his life. Alexander Downer, the Foreign Minister, leapt on the book to accuse Curtin of not being prepared to confront tyrannical regimes. Downer's attack makes one wonder whether he had read the book - he has, after all, plenty to do these days.

There is no question that Curtin was an appeaser of Japan before the war. In April 1941, eight months before Japan entered the war, Curtin as Opposition Leader met Kawai and agreed that trade was vital if relations between their two countries were to heal. Curtin said Australia could lift its ban on iron ore exports from Yampi Sound, "but Japan must guarantee Australia's safety".

Wurth has written: "Prime Minister Robert Menzies was, of course, the worst appeaser of all." And: "The warnings about Australia's danger issued by [Arthur] Fadden and Curtin were undermined by Menzies in London." This was not long after Menzies, as Attorney-General, forced waterside workers to load pig iron for Japan, thus becoming "Pig Iron Bob".

Menzies and Curtin were men of their time, trying to lead a country with a historical fear of invasion. There was little sign that the US would join the war and growing signs that Britain could not help.

On November 29, 1941, nine days before Pearl Harbour, Curtin asked Kawai: "Is it to be war?" Kawai replied: "I'm afraid it has gone too far; the momentum is too great." Kawai said the war broke his spirit. Curtin, however, "exploded into a frenzy of activity" to fight the war. He had girded the government to prepare for the possibility of war with Japan when Australia's attention was firmly fixed on helping Britain. "If anything, Curtin's reputation as war leader is enhanced by the revelations of his dealings with Kawai," Wurth writes.

His research and writing is that of a good reporter: the account of Curtin's train trip from Canberra to Melbourne a few days before Pearl Harbour is gripping; the love story involving Kawai and his American secretary sensitively told.

Wurth concludes: "Curtin and [Doc] Evatt at the very least left a legacy of a fiercely Australian approach to foreign affairs, one in which Australia befriended foreign powers, while retaining the right to criticise and speak frankly to them."

Tony Stevens is a Herald journalist.

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The Age, Melbourne, A2, Sat. July 1, 2006:
NON FICTION BOOK - PICK OF THE WEEK: Saving Australia


"Wurth writes of Curtin with considerable respect, as the decent 'ordinary great man...' "

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Some Tories ran salivating to the nearest microphone over this book, but they might have saved their energy.

The highly contentious suggestion that wartime leader John Curtin, through a close friendship with Japanese ambassador Tatsuo Kawai (whom politicians across the board called friend), may have sought a separate peace simply remains speculation.

As Bob Wurth himself says, "did Curtin...ever consider Australian withdrawing into neutrality? The answer is probably not".

Wurth writes of Curtin with considerable respect, as the decent, "ordinary great man" history has made of him. This is a study of a country at war and its one-time pacifist prime minister who "recognised (that) appeasement of Japan was misguided", and who, after having exhausted all reasonable paths to peace, became the wartime leader his country needed.

STEVEN CARROLL.

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[Bob Wurth]

The West Australian, Saturday, May 27. 2006.

CURTIN'S WWII MISSION - SAVE AUSTRALIA

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“Saving Australia is an important contribution to the history of our darkest hours...�
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On the eve of World War II in the Pacific private negotiations occurred between a senior Australian politician and the Japanese ambassador to Australia. The aim was to avoid a catastrophic conflict in our region. ROD MORAN reports.

In 1941, as the proverbial clouds of war were billowing in lethal thermals to Australia's north, John Curtin, then leader of the opposition, but soon to be prime minister, agreed to support Japanese mining and exporting of iron ore from Yampi Sound in WA. The idea was peace through increased trade between the two nations.

With Japan on a war footing and hungry for raw materials to supply its armaments and other heavy industries, it was an extraordinary proposal, one born of desperate times. (The Lyons government had banned the Japanese from mining at Yampi Sound in 1938).

Curtin suggested the arrangement to Tatsuo Kawai, the recently arrived Japanese ambassador to Australia. The meeting between the two men occurred in April 1941 at the Australian Labor Party's head office in Melbourne. In exchange, Japan was to guarantee that Australia would not be attacked.

On arrival, Kawai was a staunch supporter of Japanese imperialism. Tellingly, in 1938 he had authored a book titled, The Goal of Japanese Expansion.

Over the months meetings continued, with the constant theme of preventing war. A warm bond of mutual respect developed between the two men.

“Kawai was invited to Curtin's house in Cottesloe in July 1941,� says Brisbane journalist Bob Wurth. “He was met at the airport by Elsie and John and had dinner at their Jarrad Street house. Almost at the same time, Japan had moved from occupying northern Indo-China into southern Indo-China. In fact, while Kawai was in Perth . . . The West Australian (was) starting to talk about this occupation . . . and how the big thrust was on.�

Wurth recently revealed the full story of the remarkable contacts and negotiations between Curtin and Kawai in his Saving Australia: Curtin's Secret Peace Plan with Japan (Lothian, $34.95).

Wurth's journalistic nose for a good (and important) yarn was tweaked when he read David Day's impressive biography, John Curtin: A Life. He noticed that a Japanese envoy had come to Australia and that he and Curtin had discussed how to keep peace in the Pacific.

“Day had written two pages mentioning the talks between Curtin and Kawai, and it was more than I could find anywhere else,� writes Wurth in Saving Australia. “Day observed: “The details of these talks no longer seem to be extant.' The words leapt out at me and played on my mind.�

And so Wurth's quest began to find the documents that would confirm and fill out this little-known aspect of Japan-Australia relations on the eve of World War II in our region. “As soon as I first saw that I thought, ‘Shit, that's a great story if you could ever find any records.' But that was highly unlikely given that most of the Japanese records were destroyed. So regardless, I started to beaver away on it,� Wurth told The West Australian.

“I eventually found Tatsuo Kawai's son, Masumi, in Japan. Through him, and the historical section of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, I managed to get some of the odes written by Kawai and friends, and they included some diplomats who had been here in Australia during the war years. So it then all started to come out, bit by bit.� The poetry Kawai in particular wrote - which is skilfully used in Wurth's text - contains telling insights into his sensibility, hopes and fears.

Wurth's archival quest continued. “I'd been badgering the Japan-Australia Society, of which Kawai had been president since the war years. After the war his whole life was thrown into the relationship between Australia and Japan, he was quite obsessive about it.�

Perhaps the obsession was catching. For Wurth, the next stop was Tokyo. “I'd been sending them letters, making telephone calls, getting people in Tokyo to go around and see them . . . Anyway, just as I was about to leave for Japan, I got this brief email asking, “Would you like us to give you, when you arrive here, Mr Kawai's writings about Mr John Curtin?' I said, “Too, right I would.'“

What Wurth was given was a paper Kawai had written for the Japan-Australia Society in 1962 and which had never been translated into English. It contained the evidence of the initial meeting between Kawai and Curtin, during which the guarantee of nonaggression against Australia was given.
“Kawai actually quotes . . . what Curtin was saying: “I'll do everything I can to help Japanese access to the Yampi Sound iron ore mine in Western Australia . . . if you will guarantee Australia's safety,'� Wurth said.

Wurth obtained permission to visit Kawai's home in Manazuru on the coast by the Bay of Sagami, south of Yokahama. Kawai had died in 1966 and Wurth was expecting to find a ruin. But the residence was fully intact and quite elegant, overlooking the picturesque bay. Further, Wurth discovered one of Kawai's close friends, Toshiro Takeuchi, owner of the local inn. “He had sat down with Kawai on many evenings . . . drinking Sake in the moonlight . . . and Kawai would tell him about John Curtin,� Wurth said. “So we sat down and drank sake and he told me the story.�

But he obtained far more than an oral history of Kawai's admiring reminiscences of John Curtin and Australia. Wurth found a well-stacked bookshelf in the house. “I thought, “Gee that's interesting. I'd love to see what Kawai was reading.'“

On inspection, the volumes weren't books. They were photo albums - 42 in all. “They documented Kawai's life in pictures. They had Kawai in Australia, at Cottesloe in WA, in nazi Germany as a roving ambassador. And they had stuff sent to Kawai from Elsie Curtin (after the war) and later to his widow in Japan in the 1960s. They exchange news, letters and pictures of the grandchildren, and later visits, on both sides.�

Saving Australia is a compelling account of how the political temperature in Canberra rose to near panic levels as the spiral into all-out war became obvious. “Curtin had appeased Japan, as did almost all politicians of all parties until about mid-1941,� Wurth said. “Curtin told Menzies and the War Advisory Council of his talks with Kawai. Neither had any objections to his continuing to pursue talks for peace.

“You can read into John Curtin's speeches, particularly his addresses to the War Advisory Council, that his appeasement was very rapidly drying up. He was becoming more interested in the defence of Australia and preparedness. By the time he became prime minister in October 1941 his appeasement had gone altogether.

“He knew Japan was a very serious threat. But he constantly left the door open for discussions with Kawai. But by about mid-1941 this whole idea . . . about Yampi Sound had obviously gone out the door.�

Former pacifist Curtin made no bones about his attitude. In almost Churchillian tones he said: � . . . we will advance over blackened ruins, through blasted fire-swept cities, across scorched plains until we drive the enemy into the sea.�

Curtin's attitude was clearly in contrast to his foreign minister and attorney-general Bert Evatt who also knew Kawai. “He was never awake-up to Kawai,� Wurth says. “He believed that peace could be found right up until the first bombs fell.�

In fact, Evatt was relatively sympathetic to Japan's quest for a colonial empire to solve its resources needs. A part of his attitude has a strangely contemporary “progressive� ring to it. Poor militarist Japan's frustrations were caused by - you guessed it, the evils of US foreign policy.

So what, ultimately, was Kawai's overall strategy? “It is fairly clear from my research that what (he) was trying to do was to cut Australia off from Britain,� Wurth says. “And certainly the republicanism in the Labor Party was coming out. There was a lot of antagonism in Curtin's government towards Britain. The other thing he was trying to do was to get Australia to be neutral in the affair.�

When war broke out, Kawai was finally repatriated to Japan. Post-war, he devoted his life to encouraging the Japan-Australia trade connection. But for a time he also harboured one of the most vile of the Japanese war criminals, Masanobu Tsuji, hiding him in his house at Manazuru. He was wanted by Allied authorities for unspeakable atrocities against US and British POWs.

“Amazingly, Kawai lived to see the Japanese exploit Yampi Sound for the mutual benefit of Japan and Australia,� Wurth writes, “a dream both Curtin and Kawai hoped would stave off war . . . (He) also lived to see his son (Masumi Kawai) play a major role in Australia's iron ore exports . . . He became Mitsui's general manager in Australia, a partner in huge mines at Mt Newman and Robe River.�

Saving Australia is an important contribution to the history of our darkest hours in the maelstrom of the 20th century, one marked by highly original archival research and a superb writing style.


- Rod Moran, Books Editor, The West Australian.

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The Bulletin magazine, May 2, 2006.

SAVING AUSTRALIA'S DISCOVERIES

"New discoveries ... that will reshape the way historians view the war in the Pacific and the role of John Curtin."

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PEACE FOR IRON - CURTIN'S SECRET DEAL

Through the remarkable friendship between John Curtin, who would become Australia's wartime leader, and the Japanese ambassador,
a clandestine peace deal was sought as Pearl Harbor loomed...

A new history by Bob Wurth, Saving Australia, Curtin's secret peace with Japan, (published next week by Lothian Books) contains these sensational new discoveries - discoveries that will reshape the way historians view the war in the Pacific and the role of John Curtin. The Bulletin presents and edited extract (see home page of this site.) #

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[Bob Wurth]

Articulate, ABC News Online, "...the fascinating and
poignant story..."

WAR AND PEACE

By David O'Sullivan. Posted: Friday, May 19 2006 .

Dispensing the friendship: Bob Wurth

Bob Wurth is passionate, and why wouldn't he be. Five years after stumbling over an obscure reference in a biography of wartime prime minister John Curtin, Wurth has produced 'Saving Australia', which tells the fascinating and poignant story of Curtin's friendship with the first Japanese minister Tatsuo Kawai prior to, during and after World War II.

While some people, like Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, have pointed to the book as evidence of Curtin's appeasement, Wurth doesn't see it that way.

At last night's Brisbane launch of the book, in the hallowed surroundings of General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters, Wurth, a former ABC correspondent, said the story underscored the wisdom of being able to change position, as Curtin did, from appeaser to warrior.

There are also a number of threads which add to the richness to this story, including Kawai harbouring the war criminal Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the American woman of Japanese descent who became Kawai's private secretary, Tamaye Tsutsumida, who chose to go to Japan with Kawai rather than return to her family in the US, and his son Masumi Kawai becoming managing director of Mitsui Australia which developed vast iron ore mines in Western Australia.

While some of today's leaders may use this book to score political points, Bob Wurth clearly sees a more fundamental value in this story which he says is as much about peace as it is about war. At its heart though, one senses that the important message here is about the nature of friendship, and that surely is to be applauded.

[Bob Wurth]

The Weekend Australian Review: Books:

"...I am not convinced..."

Round up the usual suspect theories

By Ross Fitzgerald

June 03, 2006
Saving Australia, By Bob Wurth, Lothian Books, 336pp, $34.95

IT'S a strange book indeed when the preface admits that this hitherto untold story about John Curtin's secret peace deal with Japan is often incomprehensible. The core of Saving Australia is an exploration of the "extraordinary friendship" that developed between Australia's wartime Labor leader and multi-talented diplomat and poet Tatsuo Kawai, who more formally was Japan's first minister to Australia.

It is certainly true that Curtin and Kawai were deeply impressed with each other and that until they died they remembered each other fondly. However, Bob Wurth's second book goes so far as to suggest that eight days before it happened, Kawai warned Curtin about the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He also argues that, between them, Kawai and Curtin, as Opposition leader and then as PM, worked towards a secret agreement between Japan and Australia to keep both countries neutral.

On both counts, I am far from being convinced; significantly, by the end of chapter seven it seems the same applies to Wurth. Indeed, he concludes the chapter by writing: "The question may be asked, did Curtin, in the depths of the depression into which he often descended, ever seriously consider Australia withdrawing into neutrality?" The answer, he concedes, is probably not.

The closest Wurth comes to producing evidence to substantiate his case about a secret Australian-Japanese peace agreement is when he deals with a remark supposedly made by the justly famous Australian war cameraman Damien Parer in mid-March 1942.

Having returned from the Middle East with 7th Division, Parer attended one of Curtin's private press briefings in Canberra. Wurth puts it thus: "Parer later confided in strict confidence to his brother, a Franciscan priest, Father Ferdinand Parer, that Curtin had said he had actually considered a separate peace with the Japanese."

The source of this contentious statement is an interview with Ferdinand Parer by Damien Parer's biographer, Neil McDonald. The date given for this interview is circa 1987. Wurth explains that the "taped interview is with McDonald's papers at the Australian War Memorial, but not yet catalogued". The press briefing attended by Damien Parer, who later died in action, "is thought to have taken place in March or April 1942".

Although the book's central thesis is suspect, there is much to enjoy in Saving Australia. This particularly applies to Wurth's portrayal of Curtin's minister for external affairs, H.V. Evatt, who frequently met Kawai. As with Curtin, the two men liked and respected each other, so much so that on March 4, 1942, Evatt wrote an effusive letter to the Japanese diplomat. Even though Japan and Australia were at war, Evatt concluded that "while in this country, you have carried out your duties in a manner which is entirely honourable and above suspicion".

On one hand, Saving Australia is often rather terse, while on the other it reads like a badly written novel. An example of the latter is when conversations about the likelihood of war are imagined between Curtin and his 19-year-old daughter, Elsie, in 1937 while the two are walking beside the beach near their home at Cottesloe, Western Australia. The dialogue sounds false and stilted.

Another problem is the poor quality of Kawai's poetry, reproduced in the book. It may be that much has been lost in translation, but it does not make riveting reading.

Then there is the problem with the end notes. After reading with interest in the opening chapter about how, in late 1938, Australia's waterside workers had banned the loading of pig iron to Japan, only to be overruled by attorney-general Robert Gordon Menzies, I thought to look up the references to "Pig Iron Bob".

Unfortunately, end note No.39 does not appear at all in the text. As this lapse applied to the end notes to chapter one, I was not left brimming with confidence regarding the references cited in the rest of the book.

Wurth is certainly correct in claiming that the "idea of John Curtin having a close relationship with a senior Japanese official in the lead-up to war clearly does not sit comfortably with the traditional image of Curtin as our war leader". But his book does not demonstrate that Curtin, in his dealings with Kawai, was guilty of any appeasement or that any secret deal was planned between the two combatants.

Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 28 books, most recently The Pope's Battalions: Santamaria, Catholicism and the Labor Split.

[Bob Wurth]

Dr Fitzgerald drops a clanger:

WHAT ABOUT THE YAMPI SOUND AGREEMENT,
AS REPORTED BY AMBASSADOR KAWAI?

A response to Ross Fitzgerald’s review in The Weekend Australian by Bob Wurth:

__________________________________________________________________

It disappoints me to say that the historian Dr Ross Fitzgerald has dropped an alarming and not very professional clanger in his review of Saving Australia, Curtin’s secret peace with Japan in the Weekend Australian Review on June 3-4, 2006.

This review contains some fundamental errors and smacks of someone in a frightful hurry to put words on paper. I can only ask, has he really read the book?

It would seem that Dr Fitzgerald has been diverted in his reading somehow because he simply has not taken in the most salient point of the book about the reported peace agreement. I dare say that an undergraduate would be failed for such a gross omission.

It would appear also that Dr Fitzgerald has not read the extensive debate prompted by the disclosures from Saving Australia in April in the pages of The Australian newspaper. If he had been across this history debate in the Opinion pages of The Australian, which began on April 27, he would not have dropped such obvious clangers in his review.

Perhaps the most serious error by Ross Fitzgerald is that he says that the book does not demonstrate that Curtin, in his dealings with Kawai, had a secret peace arrangement when in fact the book has Kawai quoting Curtin word for word on the Yampi Sound iron ore arrangement which the reviewer simply missed altogether, despite major references in the book’s preview, in the body of the text, especially between pages 80 and 82, and in the epilogue.

I invite the reader to examine some of Dr Fitzgerald’s clangers:

• “…Wurth’s second book goes so far as to suggest that eight days before it happened, Kawai warned Curtin about the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.� Well that’s stretching it a little. I do quote Curtin as saying that Kawai came to him at that time and warned him that the momentum for war in Japan was too great. However, in regard to the Pearl Harbor claims, I simply put forward those various statements, by Professor Walter Murdoch and others. Dr Fitzgerald also should have noted that I quoted the Defence Department as being dismissive of the so-called Pearl Harbor warning to the Americans. To be accurate and fair, Dr Fitzgerald also should have acknowledged that in my book I stated that Kawai almost certainly had no pre-knowledge of the planned attack on Pearl Harbor. Had Dr Fitzgerald noticed these qualifications, he might not have made such a mistake.

• “The closest Wurth comes to producing evidence to substantiate his case about a secret Australia-Japanese peace agreement is when he deals with a remark supposedly made by the famous Australian war cameraman, Damien Parer…� The Damien Parer brief sentences quoting Curtin had nothing at all to do with the reported peace agreement between Curtin and Kawai. How could Dr Fitzgerald get that so wrong? In regard to Parer allegedly quoting Curtin about a separate peace, I even went so far as to suggest that Curtin, talking secretly to the press, was probably “thinking out loud�. Ross Fitzgerald has made much of the Damien Parer quote when it wasn’t at all directed towards the peace agreement.

• Had Dr Fitzgerald been reading The Australian from April 27 onwards, he would have read three major articles by foreign minister Alexander Downer, Hal Colebatch and I debating the secret peace agreement, as reported by Tatsuo Kawai, between himself and John Curtin. Dr Fitzgerald should have known that the reported peace agreement or arrangement was in fact was an agreement over Yampi Sound iron ore exports to Japan. This was also reported in the news pages of The Australian and in books reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald and The West Australian. The reported Curtin-Kawai peace agreement also was the introductory item in a six page special feature in The Bulletin magazine of May 2, 2006 under the big headline: “PEACE FOR IRON. Curtin’s secret deal�. In my book I reproduce in part a paper by Tatsuo Kawai written in 1962 in which he quoted John Curtin about the agreement; thus: “If Japan will do that [boost trade] for us, then it would be okay for the subordinate Australian side to lift the seizure of the Yampi Sound … but Japan must guarantee Australia’s safety.� Fitzgerald appears to have passed over this crucial reference in my book – the crux of the debate in The Australian over some three days – which was the Yampi Sound iron ore agreement in 1941, as reported by Kawai. It indeed was sloppy work on behalf of Dr Fitzgerald to miss this vital point and then to have based his critique on my alleged failure to produce the evidence about a peace agreement.

• “Saving Australia is often rather terse, while on the other it reads like a badly written novel. An example of the latter is when conversations about the likelihood of war are imagined between Curtin and his 19-year-old daughter, Elsie, in 1937… the dialogue sounds false and stilted.� Perhaps the words might read that way, but if Dr Fitzgerald had read the endnotes on these words, he would have seen that the quotes came from Curtin’s biographer and friend Lloyd Ross (John Curtin – a biography, Melbourne University Press) and were confirmed to me by the present Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, who told me that he heard the words directly from Curtin’s daughter, Elsie. Frankly, I hope Saving Australia at times does read like a novel, so long as I’m accurately quoting my sources. Students might become interested in reading accurate Australian history if it is not presented in the stilted, boring language of some of our academics.

• “Unfortunately, end note no 39. (on pig iron) does not appear at all in the text.� Guilty! I’m probably the culprit who dropped that end note in the last minute rush (I note that it has never occurred before in the history of publishing), but this hardly justifies Dr Fitzgerald’s subsequent silly comment about his lack of confidence in the entire end notes quoted in the book. (As a matter of interest, in his review at the top of the page in the Canberra Times, Michael McKernan, a Canberra historian and author, writes: "Bob Wurth, a journalist with extraordinary academic capacities - his footnotes are as detailed and thorough as any I have seen in a long time...")

• Dr Fitzgerald concludes, rather strangely: “…his book does not demonstrate that Curtin, in his dealings with Kawai, was guilty of any appeasement or that any secret deal was planned between the two combatants.� The second part of this sentence about the “secret deal� has been put to rest above, which shows that Dr Fitzgerald missed the main evidence. But his reference in the last paragraph to appeasement – mentioned for the first time in his article – has me intrigued. I have the sneaking suspicion that this might explain why Dr Fitzgerald has dumped on my book in his review. Ross Fitzgerald, by clearly not following the debate on the subject, and perhaps by rushing his read of my book, has misrepresented what this book is about. A number of commentators and letter writers and blog aficionados, having half-read my summary articles in The Bulletin and in The Australian, leapt to the conclusion that I had joined ranks with Alexander Downer and was another “history warrior� intent on destroying John Curtin’s name as Australia’s greatest war leader. In actual fact Curtin did appease Japan, as did nearly all members of Parliament during the 1930s and into 1941. But it was Curtin who was the first to wake up to the critical danger from Japan, and to move from pacifist to warrior. The Yampi Sound peace agreement, as described by Tatsuo Kawai, was dead in the water by about July-August of 1941 when John Curtin threw all his energies into the likelihood of war with Japan. Far from publishing a book designed to tear apart Curtin’s reputation, I have written that the Yampi Sound agreement – and Curtin’s wise pulling back from that appeasement – should enhance Curtin’s reputation, not damage it. The suspicion arises; did the old lefty Ross Fitzgerald in a rushed flick through the book think from the outset that I was out to do ‘a number’ on John Curtin, and thus as a result has been more than a tad negative in his review? Only Dr Fitzgerald could tell us.

• Finally: “Another problem is the poor quality of Kawai’s poetry…� This is the greatest wound of all, the deepest cut, and coming from such an acknowledged Australian expert on poetry! You cannot have any emotion, man, when you dismiss Kawai’s eloquent tanka, writing of his lost love Tamaye Tsutsumida or the young submariners who died deep beneath Sydney Harbour.

Shame on you Ross! You can be forgiven for your review but not your lack of romanticism!

You are such that
every once in a while you tell a joke
and gently untie my heart


– Bob Wurth, 26.6.2006.

[Bob Wurth]

ABC Stateline Queensland. CURTIN'S SECRET.

"A BRISBANE AUTHOR HAS LIFTED THE LID ON A SECRET WARTIME PEACE DEAL..."

=============================================

Reporter Karen Berkman, Presenter Lisa Backhouse. May 19, 2006. (Also televised in the ACT.)

LISA BACKHOUSE: A Brisbane author has lifted the lid on a secret wartime peace deal between Australia and Japan. The agreement was hammered out by John Curtin, the man often credited with being Australia's greatest Prime Minister. He was willing to trade iron ore for an ironclad guarantee that Australia would be protected if Japan entered the war. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Karen Berkman reports.

(FOOTAGE OF CURTIN FROM “THE AUSTRALIANS)
KAREN BERKMAN: It was April 1941 John Curtin was leader of the Federal Opposition, still a whisker away from gaining government, when he organised a meeting with the newly appointed Japanese ambassador, Tatsuo Kawai.

(FOOTAGE OF WORLD WAR 11)
KAREN BERKIMAN: Australia was already deeply involved in the war in Europe and North Africa the last thing the country needed was an even closer enemy.

BOB WURTH, AUTHOR, SAVING AUSTRALIA: Curtin in fact wanted to do anything to prevent war. So Curtin when Tatsuo Kawai came to Australia as first Ambassador, from Japan, Curtin was rather desperate to engage in diplomacy

KAREN BERKMAN: Brisbane author Bob Wurth is the first historian to discover documented proof that Curtin made a deal with the Japanese Ambassador

BOB WURTH: And that agreement was that Curtin would allow and encourage Japanese access to iron ore mining at Yampi Sound in Western Australia if Japan would guarantee Australia's safety.

(FOOTAGE OF TATSUO KAWAI)
KAREN BERKMAN: Curtin was walking the tightrope of appeasement with a man who'd been a strident supporter of Japanese expansionism he was a fascist and a friend of the Nazis but something about John Curtin changed his mind and possibly his heart.

TOSHIRO TAKEUCHI, KAWAI’S FRIEND: John Curtin loved Kawaisan, and Kawaisan he respect John Curtin because they are friends above the official positions.

MASUMI KAWAI, SON: John Curtin and my father talked more frankly than Government officers. I think this is the reason why my father liked John Curtin and my father got some good impression from John Curtin about Australia.

(NEWSPAPER HEADING MENZIES RESIGNS)
KAREN BERKMAN: But by the time John Curtin became Prime Minister in October 1941, he knew the deal was unsustainable.

(FOOTAGE OF CURTIN AND CHURCHILL)
KAREN BERKMAN: He'd abandoned appeasement, and was now fighting Churchill to get Australian troops back from Africa for the battle he knew was coming. Kawai went out of his way to warn Curtin that war was imminent.

BOB WURTH: Ten days before Pearl Harbour Tatsuo Kawai goes to Parliament House, meets John Curtin. Curtin says is it to be war? Tatsuo Kawai replies, “I'm afraid the momentum is too great�. So actually tips off John Curtin that war is approaching rapidly.

(FOOTAGE OF PEARL HARBOUR BOMBING)
KAREN BERKMAN: And Curtin passed the warning on to the US but still they suffered terrible losses at Pearl Harbour.

(FOOTAGE OF KAWAI IN FRONT OF HIS MELBOURNE HOUSE)
KAREN BERKMAN: For the next year Kawai was kept under house arrest at his home in Melbourne. When he was sent back to Japan in 1942 he worked to end the war. Kuwai had become a pacifist.

BOB WURTH: And when he got back to Japan he told the Japanese that they shouldn't hate Australians. This is in 1942/43 that they should NOT hate Australians, because some day we'll be trading partners, and we'll be friends and neighbours, and of course Kawai was immediately banished by the militarists and ostracised and sent down to his little coastal retreat at Manazuru where he spent the rest of the war.

(FOOTAGE OF HOUSE AT MANAZURU)
KAREN BERKMAN: It was at Manazuru that Bob Wurth found startling confirmation of Curtain's deal with Kawai.

(FOOTAGE OF JAPANESE WOMAN GOING THROUGH PHOTO ALBUMS)
Besides 45 photograph albums from his time in Australia, there was a document, written in 1962 confirming all the details.

BOB WURTH: There I am in Japan in the midst of this and I'm finding these documents that have never been revealed before that tell a whole new story about John Curtin. You stand there and the hand's shaking when you get the translated words and you think My God! Why hasn't this come out before?

(MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF KAWAI)
BOB WURTH: Was it a fact that Australians simply weren't ready to hear this sort of bizarre information. Because it is bizarre. Maybe some historians knew about this and just kept quiet I don't know.

(FOOTAGE OF JOHN CURTIN’S FUNERAL)
KAREN BERKMAN: Curtin died of heart failure not long before the war ended but Kawai's friendship with the Curtin family continued. He visited them in Cottesloe several times.

(MORE FOOTAGE OF KAWAI MEETING AUSTRALIAN BUSINESSMEN)
KAREN BERKMAN: Kawai was part of the post war Japanese Government doing everything he could to promote peace and trade. His son worked for of Mitsui, running the company's iron ore mines in Western Australia.

(PHOTOGRAPH OF ELSIE AND JOHN CURTIN)
MASUMI KAWAI: He didn't tell me why he loved Australia and John Curtin and loved Elsie Curtin anyway, but he did. #

[Bob Wurth]

Courier Mail, June 17-18, 2006.

By Alexander McRobbie

The author was a familiar figure in the local media world as the ABC's longtime Queenland manager for radio and TV. Previously he was the ABC's foreign correspondent in Asia.

In 1999 he left to write full-time.

The book is sub-titled Curtin's secret peace with Japan and its central theme is the effort by wartime Prime Minister John Curtin to keep Australia out of the coming war with Japan. Curtin was apparently very friendly with Japan's first Minister to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai, who was also against the two countries going to war.

Although the book is well researched, it doesn't give any hard evidence that Kawai and Curtin tried to arrange a secret agreement that would see Australia remaining neutral after Japan attacked the US, Britain and other Western colonial powers. Neutrality seems a highly unlikely senario, given the "Britishness" of Australia at that time. Wurth admits that "the untold story is often incomprehensible" and most readers will go along with that.

But there are some good parts in the book, notably its evocation of the politics and politicians of the period, such as H.V.Evatt who spoke glowingly of Kawai and even after thew war began he heaped praise upon the Japanese diplomat.

One aim of history is to record what people saidf and thought at the time. In this Wurth succeeds.

Author comment: Reference hard evidence of a secret agreement between Curtin and Kawai: see Kawai's documentation of their agreement, pages 80-81 of the book. Unfortunately, Mr McRobbie's review reads very much like a quick re-write of Ross Fitzgerald's, containing the same basic errors. BW.

_______________________________________________________________

Perry Middlemiss, in the Matildra weblog, reviews the book reviews...

"THIS BOOK IS STARTING TO LOOK REALLY INTERESTING."

Reviewing the The Sydney Morning Herald review (top of page) of Saving Australia:

Bob Wurth's book, Saving Australia: Curtin's Secret peace with Japan is reviewed this week by Tony Stephens. You'll recall that Bob commented on this weblog, a week or so back, correcting some factual errors in Ross Fitzgerald's review of the book in "The Australian". So it will be interesting to see if Stephens has fallen into the same trap or has actually read the whole work. It certainly starts with praise: "Bob Wurth has written an extraordinary book about a remarkable period of history, focusing on the relations between Kawai and John Curtin, the then prime minister, and other prominent Australians, such as High Court judge Owen Dixon." And continues later: "His research and writing is that of a good reporter: the account of Curtin's train trip from Canberra to Melbourne a few days before Pearl Harbour is gripping; the love story involving Kawai and his American secretary sensitively told." But as a review it merely skims the surface of the book without delving into the whys and wherefores. This book is starting to look really interesting.

www.middlemiss.org/weblog/matilda

[Bob Wurth]

Quadrant Magazine History July 2006 - Volume L Number 7-8

KOKODA: "In the context of a world war it is a strategic non sequitur. "

One Small Battle in a Big War

Stephen Barton

COMPARED TO PREVIOUS generations, few Australians have had anything much to do with the military. Yet at the same time, as John Birmingham observed in his 2005 Quarterly Essay, the military have “regained their position as a pre-eminent institution of Australian life�. Many Australians are linking their national identity to Australia’s military traditions.

There is the annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli on Anzac Day where young Australians wrapped in flags, drunk on nationalism, pride and booze, attend the Dawn Service. While others wearing the medals of their forefathers, claiming their Australianness through the deeds of their ancestors, line the streets of major cities to clap and cheer ageing returned servicemen, out-of-step airmen and obese cadets. Indeed, the curious greeting of “Happy Anzac Day!� is becoming increasingly common.

A visit to any suburban bookstore will also reveal a plethora of titles on Australians at war, ranging from the excellent, like Ross McMullan’s Pompey Elliott, to the very bad, such as Roland Perry’s biography of Monash, and a range of populist titles in between.

Although there is much to be admired in this renewed respect and interest in Australia’s military history, there is something disquietingly jingoistic about Australians “killing Kruger with their mouths�. Furthermore, Australians view their military history through a parochial filter, illustrated by Alister Grierson’s film Kokoda.

In fairness, with meagre resources Grierson has produced a well-intentioned, if flawed, film. With the exception of William McInnes as Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honner the accents are modern and out of place, and at times the film is too much like a low-budget horror film. However, one cannot doubt Grierson’s sincerity. It is clear that both he and scriptwriter John Lonie immersed themselves in the popular literature on Kokoda; the film is bursting at the seams with anecdotal tales from the campaign. The popular literature also provides the film’s fundamental premise; that Australia was about to be invaded and it was a handful of chockos and a few battalions of the AIF that saved us.

Paul Keating captured the essence of this view when he said at Kokoda, “There can be no deeper spiritual basis to the meaning of the Australian nation than the blood that was spilled on this very knoll, this very plateau, in defence of the liberty of Australia.� It was a theme replicated in Chris Masters’ Four Corners program of 1998 titled “The Men who Saved Australia�. Masters complained that the battles of the Kokoda Track were less known than those of Gallipoli or Tobruk:

“It was as if our duty to our past and the security of others eclipsed our duty to ourselves, our own world, our own future … There are other battles where actions of Australians have helped alter the course of distant wars. But the battles that were fought … [at Kokoda] have no equal in our history, because here Australians fought largely alone in defence of our own territory.�

He concluded, “They fought without the world watching … with less of the pointless bravery of the old Anzacs.� Presumably that bravery was pointless because it was not in the direct defence of Australia’s own territory.

Questioning whether the campaign really “saved Australia� or pointing out the unlikelihood of Japanese invasion can be controversial. When the Australian War Memorial’s Dr Peter Stanley observed in 2002 that Australia was not going to be invaded and Curtin exaggerated the threat for political reasons, he faced a barrage of criticism. Indeed, the recently released Saving Australia by Bob Wurth pejoratively describes Stanley as a revisionist who “disgracefully� rejected the work of other historians. At his book launch Wurth declared, “If the Memorial is to maintain its credibility, it must … distance itself from revisionist theory.�

When the Australian published a short piece I wrote on the myth of Kokoda the day before Anzac Day, Kim Beazley described it as “academic whimpery� and of trying to “take Kokoda out of the Australian legend�. The RSL National Secretary described it as “pretty offensive to those who fought on Kokoda�, while Rusty Priest described it as “denigrating the memory and sacrifice� of Australian soldiers. The Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide declared Kokoda “of crucial importance to the survival of the Australian nation�. The ABC’s Tony Jones complained, “There are people still alive who watched their mates die and they genuinely believed they were fighting for Australia and you’re telling then essentially they weren’t.�


THE KOKODA CAMPAIGN was important; it was one of the first times the Japanese army had been defeated, or rather stopped; a lesson not lost on General Slim in Burma. It took out a large number of Japanese troops, preventing them from fighting elsewhere. It also delayed the Japanese; delay being the ultimate goal of any withdrawal. This played havoc with Japanese supply lines and also allowed a repositioning of Allied troops for future offensive operations. But it was not the battle that “saved Australia�.

General Douglas MacArthur informed the Australian Advisory War Cabinet in March 1942 that the Japanese were unlikely to invade because “the spoils … [were] not sufficient to warrant the risk�. (Though MacArthur and the US Navy’s Admiral Ernest King often played up the threat to Australia as part of their competition for resources and their campaign against the “Europe first� strategy.) Indeed, the Japanese army staff were appalled by the Herculean task of invading continental Australia.

For the war to matter, it seems that we must play up the possibility of an invasion of the Australian mainland and its importance. As Peter Stanley has observed, “It seems to be that Australians want to believe that they were part of a war, that the war came close; that it mattered.� However, the Japanese army staff were undoubtedly correct in their appreciation.

Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, as Director of War Plans, outlined three main goals for 1942 required to defeat the Axis powers: maintenance of the United Kingdom; retention of Russia in the war; and the maintenance of the India/Middle East theatre. The Pacific theatre, Eisenhower concluded, would be a holding operation. It was desirable for lines to be kept open to Australia, but the prevention of an invasion of Australia “was not immediately vital to the outcome of the war�. Eisenhower wouldn’t have been telling the Japanese staff officers anything they didn’t know; invasion of Australia would have been a costly blunder.

Understandably, but not excusably, there was panic in some political circles in Australia in the first half of 1942. It was this panic, in part, that pushed the Australian government into a subservient relationship with MacArthur. Curtin also used the panic to his advantage, overcoming opposition and resistance in parts of the country, and indeed his own party, which had been unable or unwilling to see the seriousness of the world war.

By the middle of 1942 there were around 400,000 Australian and American troops in Australia; we were not quite as defenceless as the Kokoda myth suggests. However, the threat of invasion, with its attendant fears, had its uses. Indeed it is worth remembering that while Australia may have been well served by Curtin as prime minister, sections of the Labor Party and union movement were irritating obstacles to the war effort. When reflecting on Labor MP Eddie Ward’s performance during the war it’s hard not to think of Winston Churchill’s comment on one of his predecessors: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been better had he never lived.�

Of course, observing that Curtin exploited the panic and threat of the invasion is not to make light of the situation. The first half of 1942 constituted one setback and defeat after another for the Allies, be it on the Russian steppes, in North Africa, the Pacific or South-East Asia. The turning point in the Pacific, if one single event can be identified, was the Battle of Midway in June, which heralded the decline of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s offensive capability. (This battle was far more important in the course of the Pacific War than the naval battle beloved by Australian nationalists at Coral Sea, which actually saw the Japanese sink a greater tonnage of Allied shipping.) By the end of 1942, with the victories at El Alamein, Guadalcanal and the arrival of the Americans in North Africa, the tide was turning against the Axis powers.

With a focus on postwar construction and a cumbersome division between conscripts and volunteers in the army there was little Australia could contribute after 1943; indeed it sometimes it seems our main contribution to the war effort was foodstuffs, while Australian service personnel were marginalised and demobilised. Indeed, in 1944 some units of the 6th AIF Division (returned to the theatre, incidentally, on the suggestion of Churchill, not Curtin), had not seen action since Crete in 1941. As the official history notes, the later years of the war were disappointing and anti-climatic to the men of the AIF who had joined in the war’s early years.

For all this, there seems to exist a mistaken belief that because Australian soldiers were engaged in a ferocious battle at Kokoda, so close to home, then this must have been the battle that saved Australia, this must be the most important battle. In the context of a world war it is a strategic non sequitur. Peter Stanley observed in the Griffith Review in 2005 that “Australians generally look on the war essentially self-interestedly�. The war in the Middle East, Europe and Russia did not matter because it was not on our doorstep. Perhaps this is the most disturbing element of our new embrace of Australia’s martial past—combining, as it does, jingoism with parochialism.


THE FOCUS ON KOKODA and the war in the South-West Pacific is less about campaigns in the broader context of a world war than about the quest for Australian “independence�, one of the dominant themes in Australian historiography. The pageant of Australian history is generally depicted as the gradual awareness of a true Australian identity and interests, as opposed to the false consciousness of a British identity and imperial interests. This theme is evident in the works of influential historians from Manning Clark to David Day to Stuart Macintyre. This in part explains the attraction of Kokoda; Australia allegedly fighting alone for survival, abandoned by the British, and forced to look to America.

When it comes to the Second World War, no Australian historian has done more to advance this argument than David Day. In Reluctant Nation Day wrote: “The truth of the matter was that … British and Australian interests were fundamentally and diametrically opposed.� Clashes between London and Canberra, he argues, were incorrectly attributed to flaws in personalities or decision making processes rather than a “clash of fundamental interests�.

For the nationalist historian like Day, the Middle East was a “British cause� and the refusal of the Americans and British to see the South-West Pacific area as the centre of the war’s gravity underscored the need for Australia to discover its own destiny. Day has helped fashion the orthodox view of Australia’s involvement in the Second World War; to a certain extent he has created the boundaries in which other writers operate. The four Peters—Lindsay, Brune, Ham and FitzSimons—all explicitly or implicitly operate within this boundary; to varying degrees they emphasise the threat Australia faced in 1942 and the role the Diggers played in eliminating that alleged threat. The emphasis is on Australian independence and Australian interests.

Much of the work carries an unthinking assumption that Australia’s security and defence could be divorced from the interests of Australia’s allies. A more recent manifestation of this view is evident in Bob Wurth’s Saving Australia. The title itself suggests that Australia could save herself. Wurth quotes John Curtin: “Great wars in which Australia’s security is to be imperilled will not be European wars. They will be wars in the South Pacific.�

In reality, Australia’s security and interests are intimately interwoven with the security of our allies. Australia was not saved by a brigade action on a track in New Guinea, but by the sum total of different campaigns, many on the other side of the world. Sometimes Australia played an important part in these events, most of the time it did not. At El Alamein, Australians arguably played a more important part in turning the tide in the world war than they did in the campaign in New Guinea, and yet few Australians have heard of it.

It must be said, however, that on occasion Australian interests and British interests did collide, but to suggest “fundamental clashes� is simply wrong. What’s more, the suggestion that when they did collide Australia, or more accurately a Curtin-led Australia, was always on the side of right is equally false. Churchill was often wrong, but he knew more about fighting a world war than Curtin. Also, by categorically attempting to disengage Australian interests from British or American interests the nationalist approach ignores, not unlike the neutral Ireland of the war, the broader moral imperative of defeating Nazi Germany and Japan.

In the search for the mythical notion of “independence� the real lessons learned are ignored. The notion that Australia’s interests were fundamentally different from those of our allies would have been alien to both Curtin and Menzies. Both knew that Australia’s strategic future was guaranteed by the actions of our allies and that Australia needed to demonstrate it was willing to do its fair share. For a range of reasons Curtin was unable to do this from 1943, but the intent, sometimes half-hearted, was there. The lessons of the war are equally applicable in Australia’s contemporary foreign and defence policy.

There is a certain adolescent immaturity in the nationalists’ portrayal of Australia at war, with its focus on independence and our own “destiny�. That this dovetails with Australia’s growing obsession with the military is disturbing. Independence and maturity would be better demonstrated by a cool appraisal of Australia’s actions in the context of a world war against two demonstrably evil regimes. Let us hope that such appraisals are not dismissed as partisan attacks orchestrated from Menzies House, or as salvos in the so-called History Wars, or, most cowardly of all, as denigrating the sacrifice of Australian soldiers.


Stephen Barton lectures in politics at Edith Cowan University in Perth.

============================================

Readers are directed to this site's home page lecture - "The growing revisionism of Australia's political and military history" - by Bob Wurth, delivered at the Curtin University of Techology, Perth, on May 12. The lecture was delivered at the national launch of Saving Australia before the publication of the above commentary.

More recently, the September edition of Quadrant magazine has an article by Bob Wurth on this subject. An extract:

"The truth must be that Stephen didn’t read my book but subjectively quoted from my public address to the Curtin University in May. What gets me about Barton and his friend-in-arms at the Australian War Memorial, the AWM’s official historian Peter Stanley, is the bitter, derisive language some of these guardians of our history use as a substitute for constructive debate as they push their revisionist reviews. I make no apologies for saying that the AWM needs to take a good look at itself as an organisation promoting the new revisionist view of Australia’s history at war. If the AWM can’t be unbiased and accurate in its history, then there needs to be an independent inquiry to what is going on in the Memorial’s old grey bunker. " - Quadrant, September. Available at all good newsagents.

============================================

[Bob Wurth]

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'SAVING AUSTRALIA' BOOK DISCUSSED IN THE AUSTRALIAN SENATE.

"...the Minister has grossly misrepresented Bob Wurth's excellent book..."
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Labor Senator Michael Forshaw (NSW) quoted extensively from the book 'Saving Australia' in the Senate on June 21, 2006. Senator Forshaw was responding to an article by the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer on the wartime leader John Curtin. Downer's article of May 2, 2006, was in response to an article in The Australian by Bob Wurth on April 27.

Here is a brief edited version of Senator Michael Forshaw's speech in the Senate:

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On May 2 this year the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Alexander Downer, had an article published in the Australian newspaper entitled: 'Labor has a history of blind pacifism'. The article claimed that new evidence revealed a book by Bob Wurth showed that John Curtin, the former Prime Minister, was an appeaser. (Alexander Downer wrote:)

"Bob Wurth's new book Saving Australia, Curtin's secret peace with Japan, confirms what some of us have argued for some time, that until he became Prime Minister in 1941, John Curtin was not prepared to confront tyrannical regimes. This has been the pattern of Labor leaders since 1941..."

It is quite clear from reading this article that the Minister has grossly misinterpreted Bob Wurth's excellent book. In his obsessive campaign to denigrade the representative of Australia's heroic wartime leader, and probably the greatest ever prime minister, the Foreign Minister Mr Downer distorts facts and history, draws erroneous conclusions and ignores substantial evidence that contradicts his biased analysis.

As the quote says, the basis of Mr Downer's argument is the revelations by Bob Wurth about a supposed secret peace deal negotiated by John Curtin with Japan in 1941. It should be noted that at this stage John Curtin was not Prime Minister and he was the Opposition leader. John Curtin did not decome Prime Minister until October 1941, yet this deal was supposedly negotiated in secret in April 1941. (ends edited version of the Senator's speech.)


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The author's note:

I agree with much of what Senator Forshaw says in his Senate speech.

In relation to the secret peace deal in the last paragraph above, the senator has his dates correct. He is sceptical of the secret peace deal. I call it an "arrangement" and 'an agreement'. In my book, (pages 80-82), I quote Tatsuo Kawai, the first Japanese Minister to Australia, as writing in 1962 that he and John Curtin in April 1941, when Curtin was leader of the Opposition and meeting secretly with Curtin, reached an agreement on the way to maintain peace. In a document translated from the Japanese, Kawai says:

"Focusing on this point we proposed a collaborative effort to deliberately boost trade. We concurred that if that could mitigate the tension, it might become an avenue to unlock the unexpected state of affairs.

"Over conversations then went on to discussion of specific measures. Following that his [Curtin's] demeanour formalised and he said, "If Japan will do that for us, then it would be okay for the subordinate Australian side to lift the seizure of Yampi Sound - at the time the Japanese company effectively held the mining rights to this famous and resource-rich mine - but Japan must guarantee Australia's safety."

As Japan's aggression continued, clearly by about July/August 1941, Curtin had abandoned an idea of acting on his agreement with
Kawai. While Curtin was not Prime Minister at the time, and as he stated to Kawai, as reported by Tatsio Kawai himself in 1962, Curtin was only a fraction away from becoming PM and was able to influence PM Menzies.

For more information:

My original article of April 27 to which Mr Downer referred can be viewed by going to our News & Events page and clicking on the first article under "In other media" which is headed "The Australian, April 27."

Alexander Downer's complete article of May 2, to which the Senator refers, can be viewed by returning to the home page, where there is a link to his article.

Senator Forshaw's complete speech in the Senate of June 21, 2006, can be viewed by going to the Hansard transcript at:

www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/dailys/ds210606

Go to the debate headed "Rt Hon. John Curtin" which is on page 46 of the pdf.

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JAPANESE ENVOY TO AUSTRALIA: 'YOUNGER GENERATION SHOULD
KNOW MORE ABOUT OUR SHARED HISTORY'.

Comments from the Japanese Ambassador to Australia, Mr Hideaki Ueda, after reading Saving Australia:


In the context of the Australia-Japan relationship, we must remember
that during the post-war years, it was the efforts of those people, both
Japanese and Australians , who still had vivid memories of the war between us, that set us on the path to reconciliation and ultimately the strong partnership and friendship that we enjoy today.

Regardless of their personal views on the war, I have the utmost
appreciation for the efforts of people like Mr Bob Wurth, and for his exhaustive efforts to chronicle the pre-war history of our two nations,
and in particular, the friendship between Minister Kawai and Prime
Minister Curtin.

The younger generations in Japan and Australia should know more about
our shared history; both the tragedy of war and the efforts of the many
Australians and Japanese who made such valuable contribution to our reconciliation. July 6, 2006.

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News from the Consulate-General of Japan in Western Australia:



On May 12, Consul-General Hiroyuki Ariyoshi attended and spoke at the official launch of author Bob Wurth's 'Saving Australia, Curtin's Secret Peace with Japan' at Curtin University. The book, in which Mr Wurth investigates a relationship that developed between John Curtin, Australia's wartime leader, and of the first Japanese minister (effectively ambassador to Australia) Tatsuo Kawai, is a story of the desperate attempts in 1941 to reach a peace agreement between Japan and Australia prior to the outbreak of the Pacific war. According to Kawai, Curtin while still Leader of the Opposition, agreed to support Japan's mining and export of iron ore from Yampi Sound in Curtin's home state of Western Australia in exchange for Japan 'guaranteeing Australia's safety'.

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Libraries in Australia lending 'Saving Australia':

ACT Library and Information Services. ACT Public Library (APLS) 327.94052 WURT
Australian War Memorial. Research Centre (AAWM) 327.94052 W969
Bayside Library Service. Bayside Library Service (VBAY) held
Brisbane City Council Libraries. BCC Library Service (QBCL) HELD
Caloundra City Libraries. Caloundra Library (QCDRA) held
Canterbury City Council Libraries. Canterbury City Council Library Service (NCML) 327.94 WUR
Central West Libraries. Orange Library (NCWC) 327.94 WUR
Cessnock City Council. Cessnock City Library (NCES) Held
City of Boroondara Library Service (VBOR) held
City of Greater Dandenong Libraries. Springvale Library and Information Service (VDGV) 327.94052 WUR
Clarence Regional Library. Library Headquarters (NCLL) HELD
Darebin Libraries. Preston Library (VPRE) Held
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. DPMC Library (APMD) 327.94052 WUR
Eastern Regional Libraries Corporation. Eastern Regional Libraries Corporation (VEAR) held
Flinders University. Central Library (SFU) 914777 994.04 C978.W
Frankston Library Service. Frankston Library (VFRK) <18470568>
Gosford City Council. Gosford City Library (NGCL) 327.94052 WURT
Ipswich City Council. Ipswich Library and Information Service (QIPS) HELD
James Bennett Library Services Pty Ltd (NJB) qpublb
James Cook University. Townsville Campus (QJCU) 520088 Held
Kingston Information and Library Service. Kingston Information & Library Service (VKING) 327.94052 WURT
Ku-ring-gai Municipal Council Libraries. Ku-ring-gai Library (NKML) 215861 327.94052 WURT
Lake Macquarie City Council. Lake Macquarie City Library (NLMPL) held
Macquarie Regional Library. Macquarie Regional Library (NMAC) HELD
Maroochy Libraries (QMSL) held
Monash University. Monash University Library (VMOU) 2007181 MA-GEN 327.94052 W969S 2006
Moonee Valley Library Service. Moonee Valley Library Service (VMVL) 327.94052 WUR
Moreland City Libraries. Coburg Library (VMOR) held
Mornington Peninsula Library. Rosebud Library (VPEN) held
National Archives of Australia. National Archives Library (AAAR) 17318 327.94052 WUR
National Library of Australia. National Library of Australia (ANL) 3637680 N 327.94052 W969 NL 327.94052
National Museum of Australia. National Museum of Australia Library (AMOA) 327.94052 WUR
National Museum of Australia. National Museum of Australia Library (AMOA) 327.94052 WUR
Northern Territory Library (XNLS) NTL 327.94052 WURT
Parkes Shire Council. Parkes Shire Library (NPRK) held
Pittwater Council. Pittwater Library Service (NPIT) held
Port Phillip Library Service. St Kilda Library (VPPLS) HELD
Randwick City Library & Information Service. Bowen Library Maroubra (NRAND) held
Redland Shire Council Library Service. Library Headquarters (QRSL) QRSL
Richmond-Tweed Regional Library. Library Headquarters (NRTW) 327.94052 WURT
Ryde City Council. Ryde Library Services (NRYD) Held
Shoalhaven City Council. Shoalhaven Libraries - Nowra (NSCO) 327.94/WUR
State Library of New South Wales. State Library of NSW (NSL) M 327.94052/ 13
State Library of Victoria (VSL) 1265578 LD held
Sutherland Shire Libraries. Central Library Sutherland (NSCL) held
University of Newcastle. Auchmuty Library (NNCU:A) HELD
University of New England. Dixson Library (NUNE) vtls086344833 327.94052/C978zw
University of Queensland Library. Fryer Library (QU:FRYER) b22426012 DU113.5.J3 W87 2006
University of Queensland Library. Social Sciences and Humanities Library (QU:SSAH) b22426012 DU113.5.J3 W87 2006
University of Sydney. The University of Sydney Library (NU) .b31720031 fh
Wellington Library Service. Sale Community Library (VCGR) WANF
West Gippsland Regional Library Corporation. Warragul Library (VWGP) held
Whitehorse Manningham Regional Library Corporation. Box Hill Library & Administrative Headquarters (VWMR) held
Woollahra Municipal Council. Woollahra Library (NWOOL) 327.9405 WUR
Yarra-Melbourne Regional Library Corporation. Richmond Library (VYML) 818223
Yarra Plenty Regional Library Service (VHEI) HELD

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SEQUEL TO 1942 SYDNEY HARBOUR MIDGET SUB RAID REVEALED

Saturday Dec 2 10:49 AEDT

Secret papers reveal bizarre war plan
Wednesday November 29, 2006

EXCLUSIVE TO NINEMSN:
By Bob Wurth
Author of Saving Australia

When the ashes of four of the six submariners killed in the 1942 midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour arrived home in Japan later that year, Radio Tokyo called their return a chivalrous act that "greatly impressed" Japan.

The first Japanese ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai, took the ashes back to Japan and handed them to relatives of the young men on arrival at Yokohama. Kawai had come to Australia in March, 1941.

"The heroes' actions so impressed the Australian people that in spite of the fact that Australia recognises herself as the 49th state of America, they responded with the courtesy and honor of a naval funeral," Kawai told Japanese newspapers.

The National Archives referred my request to declassify the secret Australian wartime file to the historical division of the Department of Foreign Affairs, which acquiesced, believing that the bizarre details would no longer give offence to Japan.

The Curtin Government allowed the four young men from the two Japanese submarines recovered in 1942 to be cremated in Sydney with full military honors.

Japanese newspapers in 1942 also praised the Australian action in returning the ashes. This greatly interested the military propaganda section of the Allied Intelligence Bureau called the Far Eastern Liaison Office or FELO, based at Windsor and Indooroopilly in Brisbane.

FELO's director, naval commander John Proud, according to a letter to Port Moresby in December 1942, concocted a plan to cremate Japanese war dead from battlefields in New Guinea. The plan was to drop them with the identity of the dead together with leaflets drawing attention to this "chivalrous act" and deploring the unnecessary wastage of life.

"This scheme may seem fantastic at first" he said "but it has been inspired by the somewhat spectacular reaction in Japan to the action of the RAN in cremating the bodies of the Japanese who were killed in the submarines in Sydney Harbour, and returning the ashes to Japan.

"The cremating would, of course, be done on a comparatively small scale and 'off the record' there would be no guarantee that the ashes were those of the person named on the label," Proud wrote.

Proud's scheme eventually got the approval of the Allied Commander in Chief, General Douglas MacArthur.

By January 1943, Proud believed that Japanese morale was beginning to crack. He thought the return of the ashes of more Japanese "would impress the Japanese soldier that he is fighting 'gentlemen' and therefore offset the Japanese propaganda which has been to the effect that Europeans have no sense in tradition and are rather brute beasts." Proud thought the exercise would show that "the other fellow" was not so bad after all.

"It would cause considerable embarrassment to the local commanding officers. If the leaflets were properly designed they would inform the troops of our action and the commanding officer would not dare to ignore the return of the ashes," Proud added.

As the plan went ahead, undertakers and Japanese experts were consulted. One intelligence chief asked: "Is it necessary to use genuine Japanese bodies? Would not ashes of cremated animals be just as effective? There would be no difference in the chemical composition." But no animal ashes were ever used.

Commander Proud and his FELO staffers in Brisbane insisted on using only the ashes of war dead and urns identical to those used in Japan were obtained. During 1943 the accompanying leaflet was written and amended. It stated that Allied commanders "respect the traditional regard of the Japanese soldiers for the return to the homeland of the ashes of those who have been killed in battle."

By the end of end of August 1943, all was set. The urns and leaflets were attached to parachutes and loaded aboard an RAAF bomber in Port Moresby commanded by Flying Officer Gerard Keogh, who before the war had been an assistant district officer in New Guinea and a gold miner at Wewak. Keogh's wife Justina, mother Hessie and father Edmond lived at East Maitland in New South Wales.

Keogh had orders to fly over occupied Lae to drop the remains of the Japanese soldiers. The aircraft soared over the Owen Stanley Range while Proud and his staff in Brisbane anxiously awaited news.

Several years back I was sitting in the reading room of the National Archives in Canberra when an archivist delivered to me the long-closed file that had been secret since the war. It had just been declassified at my request. As I came near the end of the now declassified file I came across a cable from Port Moresby to Brisbane dated September 1, 1943. The details were not published in my book for reasons of space. I recall that when I read the cable in the NAA reading room, I could feel the hair rise on the back of my neck. The cable read:

"FOR FELO. AEROPLANE WITH F/O KEOUGH AND ASHES OVERDUE FEARED LOST. BELIEVED NOT TO HAVE REACHED LAE. SUGGEST SEND MORE ASHES AND LEAFLETS."

Keogh's bomber crashed flying to Lae, killing the pilot and crew. The cause of death on Gerard Keogh's service record reads "Flying battle." Proud desperately tried to resurrect interest in his fantastic psychological warfare scheme and to drop more Japanese ashes, but it was abandoned by his senior officers, who thought the scheme no longer worth the effort and risk. [The midget submarine raid on Sydney Harbour is featured in detail in Bob Wurth's book, 'Saving Australia, Curtin's secret peace with Japan'.]



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