Full Program Announced! Fighting to the Finish: Australia in 1945 – Strategy, Victory and Legacy Conference, Melbourne. Book Now.

This presentation provides an overview of the challenges faced by the Australian armed services as they emerged from the Second World War. It looks at how they adjusted to the changed regional dynamics after the war, the massive shrinkages in size, the new missions that emerged including the provision of occupation forces in Japan and rehabilitation at home, and to the fluid security dynamics as the post war order settled into the confrontation of the Cold War. The legacies of war for the armed services and the veterans themselves are also considered. The presentation illustrates that while the United States had played an enormous role in helping to defend Australia during the Second World War, the Australian armed forces retained their distinctive British-derived practices, procedures, equipment and orientation. This legacy would endure for decades.

From late 1944 to August 1945, Australian troops fought an aggressive campaign to destroy the numerically stronger Japanese force occupying the island of Bougainville. The largest campaign conducted by Australian forces during the Second World War, it was not without controversy. Australian soldiers displayed skill, professionalism, and bravery while enduring sweat, mud, fatigue, stress, fear, and constant patrolling. This paper will focus on the operations of the 58th/59th Infantry Battalion in Southern Bougainville in mid-1945 as a case study for the Australian campaign along the Buin Road.

On 17 May, the former Pheasants Nest Hume Motorway signage of Edward Kenna VC will be presented to the Edward Kenna VC Other Ranks Mess in the Edward Kenna VC courtyard at the headquarters of the 4th/3rd Battalion of the Royal New South Wales Regiment at Sutherland. This will mark the eightieth anniversary, almost to the day, of Kenna’s heroics on 14 May 1945 in the capture by the 2nd/4th Australian Infantry Battalion of Wirui Mission near Wewak, for which he would receive the Victoria Cross.
Following the capture of Salamaua, Lae and Finschhafen, the 6th Australian Division was deployed to New Guinea in early 1945 to relieve the Americans, who General MacArthur preferred to utilise elsewhere. Its brigades – the 16th, 17th and 19th – included, in the 16th, three battalions of New South Wales origin – the 2/1st, 2/2nd and 2/3rd; and in the 19th, another – the 2/4th.
Between late April and early July 1945, the 6th Australian Division advanced from the Hawain River eastwards along the New Guinea Coast to Wewak – the last sea-based fortress of the Japanese in Papua New Guinea, with long prepared extensive defences, on terrain which dictated that the attack had to be entrusted to a single battalion. This would be the 2/4th.

In May 1945, Lieutenant Cyril Miles from the 2/5th Battalion accepted the surrender of a 42-strong Imperial Japanese Army “battalion” near Aitape, in northern New Guinea. At the time, it was the largest mass surrender in the Imperial Japanese Army’s history, and the Lieutenant Colonel Battalion Commander was the senior Japanese Army officer taken into Allied captivity. With Allied forces advancing towards Japan, the Aitape surrender provided crucial insights into whether Japanese commanders would accept a decision from Tokyo to end the war.

Japanese veteran interviews reveal surprising opinions about the end of the Second World War. While their views vary, as do those of all veterans, two views predominate: one is they should not have surrendered; the other is they were beaten by better weapons and economic power, not superior courage. 

On 22 April 1954, Dr Richard Smibert of Wellington Street, St Kilda added an impassioned postscript to the frank letter he had written two days earlier to the official medical historian of the Second World War, Dr Allan S. Walker. Smibert’s correspondence was in response to Walker’s request for feedback regarding his draft chapter on the Aitape-Wewak campaign. Smibert did not hold back in expressing his anger and frustration at the ‘fanatical and unscientific attitude of senior members of the Australian Army Medical Corp’ concerning the malaria epidemic that cut a swathe through 6 Division AIF during the ‘futile’ Aitape-Wewak campaign almost a decade earlier. This presentation examines this and other controversial issues that impacted the medical care of Australian soldiers in Aitape during the final months of the war.

Between the reality that confronted Australian troops in their efforts to bury the dead in the war against Japan and the beautiful peaceful war cemeteries we see today exists a void in our understanding of just how the dead of this war came to be relocated from the mud, blood and muck of jungle battlefronts to the carefully manicured and maintained war cemeteries of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. This paper will highlight the efforts of Australia’s war graves units to locate and identify the dead of the war against Japan during active operations in New Guinea, exposing the unique and challenging circumstances faced by these units in the Pacific in their effort to carry out what was a gruesome yet necessary task, but one which marked the first official memorialisation of the dead of this war.

The Dutch East Indies was one of the great European colonial experiences that continues to resonate in the Netherlands and Indonesia today. If it were not for the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies in 1942, the Indonesian independence movement might never have gotten off the ground. The British, the Americans and Australia all contributed to the independence process. The Dutch fought, bargained and negotiated to the finish, but after 361 years, their colonial presence in South-East Asia came to an end in 1949.

Between November 1945 and February 1946, on the island of Morotai, Australia convened some of the first war crimes trials in the Pacific. These tribunals prosecuted Japanese officers and soldiers accused of atrocities against Australian prisoners of war, confronting unique legal and logistical challenges. This paper examines the trial of Captain Tokio Iwasa, accused of killing a captured Australian airman, as both legal proceedings and an expression of political policy: a demonstration of Australia’s determination to assert authority in regional affairs and to influence the emerging framework of postwar justice.

The siege of Tobruk has enjoyed a central position within the annals of Australian military history. Sydney’s Anzac Memorial describes the siege as “one of the most cherished” battle-honours gained by the 2nd Australian Imperial Force. For veterans of the siege, however, their post-war experience saw them in another, much longer battle: a struggle against forgetting. There was a distinct sense among the famed Rats of Tobruk that the memory and legacy of the siege in Australia was theirs to shape, but that it was at risk of being lost with the passing of time, and the increasing loss of veterans themselves. This presentation focuses on the Rats of Tobruk Association’s campaign to ensure the posterity of Tobruk in Australian national memory, from legal protection for the word “Tobruk” to the construction of a national memorial on Anzac Parade in Canberra. It will end with a discussion of a new national survey of public attitudes towards Tobruk and the broader Second World War, as it assesses the current state of Australians’ understanding of this conflict.

The war’s promised to also end the cycle of wartime casualty reporting and a constant dread that casualty news could touch close to home. By 1945, tens of thousands of people across Australia had received news of a loved one or close friend having been killed or reported missing – with many receiving news of wounds, injuries, illnesses, or capture. The social impact of casualty notifications was extended by the fact the news radiated outwards and into interconnected circles of extended family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. Although many families had already received a confirmation of death or, alternatively, of survival, at the war’s end many others were still waiting to perhaps learn the fate of one or more loved ones reported missing. The end of fighting generated an upsurge in demand for information as it was possible finally to confirm the fate of prisoners of the Japanese and search previously inaccessible areas of Europe and the Asia-Pacific. This paper discusses the armed forces response and commitment to bringing some form of ‘closure’ if this was possible.

Pub wisdom tells us that Britain lost an empire to win a war. But did it? Under pressure from President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill had committed Britain to build a new international order of self determination, and the Atlantic Charter of 1941 appeared to be a blueprint for a post imperial world. But in 1945 a series of decisions, military campaigns and broken promises unfolded in SE Asia and the Pacific. And one of them- in Indochina – set the region cup for thirty years more of war.