Send The Australians. We Already Tried.” — The US Warning That Rewrote Allied Strategy

In early 1942, the Japanese military was doing something no modern army had done before. In just 70 days, they swept through Southeast Asia and the Pacific like a tsunami, capturing territory faster than anyone thought possible. Malaya fell. Singapore surrendered with 85,000 Allied troops laying down their arms, the largest capitulation in British military history. The Dutch East Indies collapsed. Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma. One after another, the dominoes came down and caught in the middle of all of it were the

Australians. Nearly 22,000 of them became prisoners of war in the those opening months alone. Of those captured by the Japanese, only about 14,000 would survive the war. The rest would die in labor camps, on the Burma Railway, in places most people back home would never hear of. But the nightmare was just getting started. While Australian soldiers were being captured and killed across Southeast Asia, the bulk of Australia’s best fighting men were on the other side of the world. They were in North Africa fighting Raml in the

deserts of Tobuk and Elammagne. And when Prime Minister John Curtain demanded they come home to defend Australia, Winston Churchill refused. Churchill wanted those troops rerouted to Burma instead to protect British India. Curtain said no. He went against the most powerful leader in the British Empire and ordered the seventh division home. It was a decision that changed the course of the Pacific War and it marked the moment Australia stopped looking to London and started looking to Washington. [music] In March 1942,

General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Melbourne after escaping the Philippines. He took command of the entire Southwest Pacific area. Almost a million American servicemen would eventually pass through Australia during the war. But in those early months, there was a problem. America did not have enough trained troops in the Pacific yet. The forces that were arriving had never seen jungle comb