“A Day That Will Live In Infamy” is how President Franklin D. Roosevelt described December 7, 1941. On this day, just a little before 8 in the morning, 353 Japanese bombers attacked and decimated the U.S. naval base of Pearl Harbour at the Hawaiian Island, Oahu. The Japanese bombers sank three battleships, damaged others and destroyed 160 combat aircraft in two waves of attacks. However, the greatest devastation was the 2,403 lives lost and 1,178 wounded by the attacks.
Japan had simultaneously declared war against the United States and Great Britain, then immediately launched stunning attacks spanning 6,400 kilometres (and the international date line) from Singapore to Hong Kong, Malaya, Bangkok, Guam, and the Philippines.
It was this most iconic event that drew US into the second world war that had begun in 1939.
Pearl Harbour Opened The Pacific Theatre
The attack opened the war’s Pacific theatre, spanning the entire ocean. It brought untold devastation, loss and change to the Pacific’s remotest islands and its densest population centres.
Japan’s opening attacks triggered a cascading crisis of events. After the December 7 and 8 attacks, Australians were told that halting Japan’s southward expansion “all depends on Singapore”.
Singapore fell in a matter of days, on February 15 1942. Prime Minister John Curtin described this event as “Australia’s Dunkirk”, leaving it wide open to invasion. New Guinea was then attacked on February 16.
Darwin Bombed
Three days later, the war came to Australia’s mainland. Darwin was bombed for the first time on February 19, killing more than 230 people and destroying infrastructure.
Bombing raids across northern Australia followed, as did acute fears of Japanese submarine attacks along the industrial and heavily populated east coast. These fears were realised with attacks in Sydney Harbour in May and Newcastle in June 1942.
The arrival of American troops reversed Australia’s desperate situation. The first of nearly 1 million who rotated through Australia (then with a population of 7 million) began arriving in December 1941.
In the wake of the Pacific-wide attacks of December 7 and 8, Curtin recognised Australia’s grave defence vulnerabilities premised on deeply flawed British imperial plans. He declared “Australia looks to America as its only hope against invasion. That reddish veil which o’er the face Of night-hag east is drawn: Flames of a new disaster for the race? Or can it be the dawn? So wrote Bernard O’Dowd. I see 1942 as a year in which we shall know the answer. I would, however, that we provide the answer. We can and we will. Therefore, I see 1942 as a year of immense change in Australian life”.
“The Australian Government’s policy has been grounded on two facts. One is that the war with Japan is not a phase of the struggle with the Axis Powers, but is a new war”.
“The second is that Australia must go on to a war footing. Those two facts involve two lines of action— one in the direction of external policy as to our dealings with Britain, the United States, Russia, the Netherlands East Indies and China in the higher direction of the war in the Pacific. The second is the reshaping, in fact, the revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently, and with-out question”.
The arrival of American troops ensured Australian soil would not be the battleground for defeating Japan. Instead, Pacific islands from the Alaska Territory’s Aleutian Islands, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Australia’s colonies of Papua and New Guinea to Japan’s former mandated territories colonies, like the Northern Marianas, saw four years of slaughter.
The blood-letting finally ended with the war’s greatest mass-casualty events of all, the US atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.
Throughout the war, Australia (first Melbourne and then Brisbane) served as America’s headquarters for prosecuting the war against Japan. The countless bonds forged in war were only solidified after the war’s end with the rapid escalation of the Cold War and the outbreak of proxy wars in the Pacific region involving the US and its allies against Communist Russia and China. These were most notably in Korea (1950-1953) and then Vietnam (1965-1975).
On this most solemn of milestones in our nation’s history, we would do well to pause and remember the poem “For the Fallen”, by the English poet and writer Laurence Binyon.
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
The war with Japan finally ended with the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/AAP
The brutality and devastation sparked by the Pearl Harbour attacks should not fade from the minds of politicians from all sides. Eighty years on, there remain powerful lessons to be learned.
