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Originally Posted by Raellus
I want to preface this post by admitting that I don't know a whole lot about Australia's military involvement in WWII. I'm not trying to stir up drama here, or insult anyone. I want the Australian perspective on this issue and that's why I'm posting this here.
In his history of the final year of the Pacific theater, Retribution, Max Hastings, a British historian, gives a scathing assessment of many Australian units in the Pacific theater, claiming that they fought neither hard nor well. He attributes this to the fact that the British sent the best Aussie units to fight in North Africa and Italy, leaving less well equipped, trained, and motivated troops behind to defend Australia. These units would later be sent to New Guinea and elsewhere in the PTO to fight the Japanese and, with a few notable exceptions, they did not perform particularly well. Hastings goes on to rip MacArthur for his costly vanity project of retaking the Philippines.
He also rips the Australian dockworkers for striking multiple times throughout the war, serious hampering Allied logistics.
How are these two issues seen by Australians? Is there anything there or is Hastings so sort of Australiophobe?
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Rae,
I try not to take anything Hastings says too seriously. His book on Normandy was kinda insulting where he asserted the Germans were the finest army in the world at that point. I suppose in 1941, they were. But by 1944? Their finest was making all kinds of fatal land deals on the Eastern Front and what was left was concentrated in the Waffen-SS and select units. The rest? Pick from Soviet and Polish POWs, older reservists, the lame and the sick and occupation troops. And the way he denigrated all the Allies, well, John Keegan was so maddened by it, he wrote Six Armies in Normandy as a response. Much better book IMO.