Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
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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I'm not an Australian, but a Pacific War student. It's kinda true, but not the whole truth.
The NZ (Wellington, IIRC) dockworkers' union were definitely not feeling any urgency in July '42, when the Marines needed to combat-load their ships before the Guadalcanal landings. Marines had to take over the docks. I'm not aware of any other incidents, that may have been the most serious.
Australia raised, IIRC, roughly 3 divisions before 1942, and two of those went to the Mediterranean, another went down at Singapore, so that left scattered small militia units to get overrun by the Japanese. If there had been more (and air cover) to make a real fight of Rabaul, that could have changed the course of the war. When those troops came back to fight on New Guinea, they struggled with the harsh terrain and slim logistics, but IMO they put in a better record than the green Americans in late 1942.
After that, it seems like MacArthur did his level best to sideline the Australians. It got to the point where there were Australian staff officers and units assigned to the Sixth US Army, so he created "Alamo Force", using only American elements to do all the same things that Sixth Army was supposed to do.