Talk:Proposed Japanese invasion of Australia during World War II

What the heck does this section mean
I was able to figure out what a great deal of it actually means, but I couldn't get the whole intent of this section:


 * During the air attacks in 1942-42 times,if distacated the role occupied by local desing RAAF interceptors Commonwealth CA-1 "Wirraway"(one of theirs destroyed one Mitsubishi A6M ) and Commonwealth CA-13 "Boomerang",along Australian Army Antiaircraft units in defense of nation.

Any ideas? --Easter Monkey 11:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)


 * the quote in 'Australian preparation for a Japanese Invasion' section is also gibberish. Delete the whole section? --Squiddy 12:48, 14 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me, the whole article needs a rewrite. --Easter Monkey 17:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

If someone can find the actual quote, please feel free. In any case, here is the section in question in its full gibberishhood:

Australian preparation for a Japanese Invasion
Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, envisioned such danger and translated the anxiety of own people in a message directed to Washington on March 13,1942:

"Australia was the last allied battle between the west coast of America and Japan. If ours falling the American land if encounter opened to subsequent enemy invasion. It affirmed why saved to Australia, was saved to west coasts of United States.own people fighting in enemy invasion success, until the last man, also ours practised scorched land policy"

In Australia during this period there were directives aimed at the civil population in case of any Japanese Armed Forces naval disembarkations or airborne troops landings at in the territories. During the air attacks in 1942-42 times,if distacated the role occupied by local desing RAAF interceptors Commonwealth CA-1 "Wirraway"(one of theirs destroyed one Mitsubishi A6M ) and Commonwealth CA-13 "Boomerang",along Australian Army Antiaircraft units in defense of nation.

--Easter Monkey 17:22, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Needs a lot of work
While this is an interesting topic, as it currently stands this article is riddled with incorrect information and some of it appears based on the false belief that the Japanese ever began preperations to invade Australia (as the proposal to carry out an invasion was quickly rejected no such preperations took place). In particular, the statements attributed to Kenosuke Sato need to be qualified as some of them are clearly incorrect (for instance, that the inital bombing of Darwin was conducted as a preliminary to an invasion - the bombing was actually related to the invasion of the Dutch East Indies and the Japanese never intended to follow it up with an invasion force).

An appropriate avenue for future redevelopment of the article may be to strip it back to just the facts, and move the coverage of the Japanese attacks on Australia into a seperate article. --Nick Dowling 01:01, 3 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I've stripped out all the information which is clearly incorrect. In particular I've removed the coverage of the Japanese attacks on Australia. As these attacks were not related to any invasion plans (for the simple reason that these plans were never put in place) they should not be covered in this article, much less with text claiming that they were a precursor to invasion. Whoever Kenosuke Sato is/was, he isn't a reliable source on Japanese planning and operations in 1942. --Nick Dowling 10:35, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

More gibberish
"Some Australians in Papua no stayed at favour of Japanese presence n area ,theirs feared the effects of conflict on Papuans when their autority would be undermined by war against at non-white race."

Could not make much sense of it, deleted


 * This article continues to be full of gibberish. The scary thing is that the facts behind the gibberish aren't much more coherent! This article would benefit from a total re-write. --Nick Dowling 10:27, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Back to the sources cited so far?
There are two online sources in the references section. Perhaps we could start to build the article from them; these sources easily referenced by a number of editors for collaborative purposes and while other sources are of course fine it is just perhaps a little harder to work together from them.

The first online source already referenced is The paper describes Stanley as Principal Historian, Australian War Memorial. He notes "I’m grateful to my Research Centre colleague Mr Craig Tibbitts, whose 2001 University of Canberra research paper “Japan and Australia during the Second World War” provided a solid foundation for the interpretation I present in this paper." The paper takes issue with the "popular" perception that "Japan planned to invade Australia, would have had not the battle for Papua been won, and that the man responsible was the great war leader John Curtin." Stanley argues there was "was in fact no invasion plan [and] that the Curtin government exaggerated the threat"

The second online source included in the references is
 * At page 640 Gill states "neither Churchill nor Roosevelt regarded fullscale Japanese invasions of Australia—or of India—as likely ."
 * At page 643: "As to Japanese invasions of Australasia and India, the Japanese Prime Minister, Tojo, in the last interview he gave before his execution on 23rd December 1948, insisted that Japan had no plans for the physical invasion of Australia or New Zealand . In a statement he said in reply to a specific question regarding any contemplated invasion of New Zealand and Australia :
 * "We never had enough troops to do so. We had already far out-stretched our lines of communication . We did not have the armed strength or the supply facilities to mount such a terrific extension of our already over-strained and too thinly spread forces. We expected to occupy all New Guinea, to maintain Rabaul as a holding base, and to raid Northern Australia by air. But actual physical invasion—no, at no time."
 * Gill footnotes this as "Typed copies of this statement were submitted to him and his defending solicitor, an American, Mr George Blewett, and approved by them both."

I think we should be saying in this article is that although there is a popular perception that Japan planned to invade Australia (cite Stanley), there was no plan (cite Stanley and Official History, specifically Tojo's statement). The article should be short - writing about somehting that neither happened nor was planned to happen should not be a large article, that would be out of proportion to the importance of the subject.--Golden Wattle talk 20:55, 5 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. However, the Japanese military did do some preliminary studies for the invasion and it was briefly considered by the Japanese high command, and this should also be mentioned. --Nick Dowling 09:14, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this article requires an extensive re-write. It is now well-known that the Japanese were quite unable to mass the transport to undertake an invasion of the Australian mainland, but several invasion plans have surfaced since the war. The authenticity of these plans is questionable, but as they exist in the NAA and the AWM, perhaps with the appropriate disclaimers, they may be of value here. In the same vein, there are several reliable, citable sources which claim that the invasion threat may have been real enough as well. Australian Bunker Project 15:18, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * What reliable sources state that the Japanese intended to invade? The consensus seems to be that the Japanese seriously, but briefly, considered mounting an invasion but gave up on this due to it being far beyond their capabilities. Instead they adopted a strategy of isolating Australia by capturing New Guinea, New Caledonia and Fiji which only lasted for a few months until the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. --Nick Dowling 23:33, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

New title
As the first stage of a re-write this article needs a new title which makes it clear that the Japanese didn't 'plan' to invade Australia but only considered this before rejecting the idea. 'Japanese consideration of invading Australia' isn't very good though. Any ideas? --Nick Dowling 06:16, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've moved the article in line with the comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history --Nick Dowling 08:09, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Title is unwieldy. Some alternative titles, more abstract or specific (not always shorter): (1) Existential threat to Australia (1942); (2) Japanese threat to Australia 1942; (3) Japanese threat to Australia during World War II; (4) Australia's response to Japanese wartime advance; or (5) Australian response to Second Operational Phase of Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere expansion. The present article should be from Australian POV, referring to Japanese POV. Japanese planning & execution should be in a separate article: Second Operational Phase (1942), which I am writing right now (greatly helped by the article by this name in Japanese Wikipedia). I am using US English (normal for me); please someone revise it into Australian English when done (because of more interest to Australians than Americans; but article itself from Japanese POV). Until article is finished, banzai for red-links! Vagabond nanoda (talk) 09:24, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I think the current title is the most natural one. ITBF (talk) 10:41, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Rewrite
Sometime in the next few weeks I intend to rewrite this article from scratch. No sources have been provided to support any of the current claims and my preliminary reading incdicates that much of the article is flat out wrong (for instance, that Yamamoto proposed an invasion of Australia - it seems that he actually opposed this, prefering instead to attack Midway). --Nick Dowling 07:03, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Corresponding Japanese page
If there is a Japanese (or any other language) article on the subject, this article could be linked to it. Or, it could be translated.--Mbowden (talk) 15:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Re-write now under way
Given that Peter Stanley's excellent new book 'Invading Australia' has a couple of pages which discuss this article, I thought that it was long past time to re-write it. I have completely replaced the existing text with a description of the Japanese Army and Navy's dicussions about invading Australia in early 1942 which is drawn from Henry Frei's book, which seems to be the de-facto standard work on this topic. I would like to propose including a section on the Australian response to the threat of invasion and possibly another section on the current aparantly popular perception that Japan seriously intended to invade Australia. Nick Dowling (talk) 12:20, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
 * By the way, if you're visiting this article after reading the description of the article in Stanley's book, the article's history shows how it has evolved. Nick Dowling (talk) 12:25, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Stanley's work is all controversial for a reason. It is rubbish. No real historian accepts his arguments and they have no place here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.148.43.180 (talk) 05:51, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, that's not true. Nick-D (talk) 06:05, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

Peter is at it again
I see Peter is claiming yet another wiki page as his own personal property under the stage name Nick-D. Everyone prepare for censorship of your opinions. Pete is on the loose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.50.62.191 (talk) 11:41, 19 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Um, no. You've mistaken me for someone else entirely. Nick-D (talk) 11:45, 19 August 2013 (UTC)