Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2021/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7

In the fictional Star Trek universe, there is a military training exercise called the Kobayashi Maru. The exercise is designed to test the character of Starfleet Academy cadets in a no-win situation. Basically, the cadet is confronted by an overwhelming force of Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Borg or whoever the quarrelsome Federation is at war with this week. (Federation warships roam the galaxy looking for fights.) Of course, it is all just a simulation. In the show, cadet James T. Kirk wins the no-win scenario by cheating; he simply reprograms the scenario computer to make the enemy ships explode on command so he can win, because he doesn't accept the idea of unwinnable scenarios. (TV script writers aren't too fond of them either.)

Are such exercises conducted in real life? Douglas MacArthur recalled that for his first lieutenant's examination, he was asked to describe how he would defend a harbour given a certain number of troops. He detailed how a defence could be organised. He was then asked how he would go about defending the harbour without any troops - clearly a no-win scenario. He replied that he would go round putting up signs warning of the danger of minefields.

As it happens, unwinnable scenarios often crop up in actual battles and campaigns. Battles can be lost for many reasons; common ones being overwhelming numbers of opponents, logistical failure, incompetent leadership, technological inferiority, inclement weather and unfavourable terrain. Frequently, it is a combination of these factors. Usually, the attacker wins, because if they didn't think they were going to win then they probably wouldn't have attacked in the first place. A common scenario is the kind that confronted Second Lieutenant MacArthur. Clearly, his would be a short term solution, but often trading space for time is the best that can be hoped for. Such was the situation confronting Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee, the Chief of the General Staff of the Australian Army in 1941. He had assumed in the post in August 1940 on the death of his predecessor, General Sir Brudenell White in the 1940 Canberra air disaster.

The task of defending against a Japanese advance had been under consideration by Australian Army officers for decades. While the strength, efficiency and ferocity of the Japanese forces were all underestimated, the magnitude of the task was not. Sturdee was fully aware that the resources of Australia were small compared to those of Japan. Australia's main defence was geography: Australia was protected on three sides by the South Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. Attacks had to originate from the north, through the islands of south east Asia, which at the time were under American, British and Dutch colonial rule. The centrepiece of this was the Singapore strategy, under which a British fleet based on Singapore would intercept any Japanese force moving south, which had to be by sea. Sturdee, like the majority of Australian Army officers, had little faith in a British fleet being sent, especially after war erupted in Europe in 1939. The strategy that the Army developed was to hold the islands. To do this, it was important that the Dutch, who ruled Indonesia at the time, would resist the occupation of their colony, and not allow the Japanese to occupy it, as the French had in Indochina.

In order to obtain agreement from the Dutch controlling Indonesia, certain concessions were made by Australia. It was agreed that Australian troops would join in the defence of the islands of Ambon and Timor. These were islands with air bases that could, in Japanese hands, threaten northern Australia. Troops sent to Timor and Ambon thereby secured a valuable political objective before a shot was fired. But it is a well-known truism that an island garrison cannot be held indefinitely unless it can be reinforced or resupplied. Ambon and Timor were definitely islands and retaining them required control of the surrounding sea and air. It was hoped that a string of air bases across Indonesia would be able to prevent the Japanese fleet moving south. Sturdee was confronted by a difficult situation. He decided to garrison each island with a battalion. Calls for a larger garrison of at least a brigade on each island were easy to turn down because he only had one brigade available. Moreover, if control of the sea and air could not be secured, then the islands could not be held, however large the garrisons were. Sturdee simply wrote them off.

After the war Sturdee described the situation thus:"I realised at the time [in 1941–42] that these forces [on Rabaul,Timor and Ambon] would be swallowed up ... but these garrisons were the smallest self-contained units then in existence. My only regret now looking back was that we didn't have more knowledge of the value of Independent Companies, at that time they were only in the hatching stage and their value unknown. I am now certain that they would have been the answer, and at no time did I consider that additional troops and arms should be sent to these potentially beleaguered garrisons, as it would only put more [men] in the [prisoner-of-war] bag."

Commenting on the strategy after the war, Colonel Eustace Graham Keogh wrote: "Taking the prevailing circumstances into full account, it is hard to justify the detachments at Ambon and Rabaul. Neither place was a vital link in the defences or communications. Certainly it was highly desirable to deny the enemy access to them, but once command of the sea had been lost any forces stationed at those places could not be supported until the navy situation had been restored. In neither case was the force anything like strong enough to survive for the required length of time, or even to impose delay on the powerful forces the enemy was employing. It is true that the arrangements for the despatch of these forces were made before Japan struck, before the strength of the blows she would deliver had been appreciated. But after her probable course of action and her methods had been amply demonstrated there was still time to reconsider the situation. Despite this demonstration, it would appear that Army Headquarters persisted in believing that these lone battalions could impose delay on the enemy. Consequently the maxim, enunciated it is believed by one of the early Pharaohs, operated in full– "Detachments beyond effective supporting distance usually get their heads cut off." There are, of course, occasions when something worthwhile can be gained by the sacrifice of a detachment. This was not one of them."

Although the magnitude of the task was not underestimated, the speed, ferocity and effectiveness of the Japanese forces was greater than anticipated. Ambon fell quickly, and the Japanese advance was not delayed at all. About 300 of the Australian and Dutch defenders of Ambon were summarily executed. About 30 escaped to Australia. Of the 582 Australians who remained on Ambon, 405 died in captivity. Sturdee was quick to urge a change of strategy to one of defending Australia. Fortunately, in military theory, Australia is a continent, not an island because it has the resources to generate its own armaments, reinforcements and food supplies, and therefore cannot be starved into submission by blockade. Moreover, since the distance from Tokyo to Sydney is about the same as from Tokyo to Seattle, and Australia has more coastline than the United States, a blockade would be hard to enforce. At one point an American officer asked Australia's Vice Chief of the General Staff, Major General Sydney Rowell, what would be the response if a Japanese force landed at Broome and advanced on Alice Springs. Apparently, this was considered a serious threat in Washington, but less stupid operations than a 1700 km advance across a desert have been known to wipe out whole armies, and Rowell replied that it would be a job for the Salvage Corps.

The Australian Army considered that only sure way of invading Australia was to go for the jugular, attacking the south east, where the major centres of industry, population and agriculture lay. The Army determined to defend this area rather than disperse its strength trying to defend the entire continent. This became known as the Brisbane Line strategy. (The "line" in question was not a fortification, just a straight line on the map.) It was calculated that due to the distance, the Japanese could deploy no more than three divisions against this area, where they would be outnumbered by the Australian defenders. The biggest problem with the strategy in 1942 was political: the Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin, came from Fremantle, and the Minister for the Army Frank Forde represented Capricornia in northern Queensland, both well outside the Brisbane Line. They had little experience in military matters and relied heavily on the senior officers in the theatre. Curtin remained obsessed with Timor and Ambon until his death in 1945, pressuring General MacArthur and General Sir Thomas Blamey to recapture the islands. Sturdee spent a spell as Australian representative in Washington, DC, but returned to Australia in 1944 to command the First Australian Army in the final campaigns of the Pacific War.

In a 2010 PhD thesis on Ambon, David Evans attacked Sturdee as incompetent. A more balanced appraisal was written by Michael Evans in 2000: "At this time, Sturdee and his colleagues were faced with critical decisions in the face of a swift and unrelenting tide of Japanese success—a success that seemed to herald an imminent invasion of Australia. Under these circumstances, that the Chiefs of Staff sought, at high cost, to keep the Japanese military juggernaut as far as possible from Australian soil should be no great surprise. The Chiefs of Staff recommended a change of strategy only when there was irrefutable evidence of military failure to place before the War Cabinet. Such a stance was consistent with both the turbulent political climate in Australia and the realities of coalition warfare that prevailed in early 1942... If there is a villain in the tragedy of Ambon in 1942, it is a "ghost in the machine’ that can be found in the systemic crisis of Australian defence in 1941–42—a crisis caused by twenty years of neglect of defence by a succession of governments and by the electorate they served.""

I cannot conclude without rebutting Evans' repeating the zombie myth that 18 to 20 divisions from Siberia turned the tide in the Battle of Moscow in 1941. This has been thoroughly debunked.