The PR Blog

On 19^th February, 1942 real war came to Australia when two air raids by Japanese carrier based aircraft wrecked the town and the adjacent army and RAAF bases.

The first inkling that anybody in Australia had that something was about to occur was at 9.30am on Bathurst Island, about 80kms NE of Darwin. When the missionaries and islanders saw a huge formation of aircraft at high altitude. The mission was headed by Father John McGrath who also acted as a volunteer coastwatcher.

The mission was equipped with a radio transceiver linked to the AWA Darwin Coastal Station under call sign VID. AWA ran many aeradio stations under contract to the Department of Civil Aviation with range all over Australia and as far as Portuguese Timor.

The Adelaide River Stakes is the name given to the mass exodus of people prior to and following the Japanese air-raid in Darwin on 19^th February, 1942. Thanks mainly to an ill-informed statement by a former Governor General, Paul Hasluck, that it is a story full of shame for our national persona, but it is a myth.

The truth is that with much closer examination it was anything but a shameful episode in our most serious year of peril. The propaganda disseminated by the government of the day was based on inadequate information, over-the-top censorship and a failure to take the population into its confidence. 

The faults lie with a succession of failed civilian and military administrations which, like the behaviour of most politicians, was a deliberate trail of cover-ups and refusal to admit fault.

The raid on Pearl Harbour failed to catch the US carrier force which was still at sea. It also failed to destroy the oil storage facilities that would have crippled any ability to send a pursuing force.

The Japanese strategists knew that the obvious place for an American fight back to be based was Australia. It rapidly consumed the Dutch East Indies and the island of New Britain which was part of the PNG mandated territory awarded to Australia by the League of Nations.

On 10^th December, 1941 the tactics conceived by Yamamato and Nagano were again proved correct when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya.

At the same time Guam was captured from the Americans.

The Adelaide River Stakes is the name given to the mass exodus of people prior to and following the Japanese air-raid in Darwin on 19^th February, 1942.

Thanks mainly to an ill-informed statement by a former Governor General, Paul Hasluck, that it is a story full of shame for our national persona, but it is a myth.

The truth is that with much closer examination it was anything but a shameful episode in our most serious year of peril.

The propaganda disseminated by the government of the day was based on inadequate information, over-the-top censorship and a failure to take the population into its confidence.

The faults lie with a succession of failed civilian and military administrations which, like the behaviour of most politicians, was a deliberate trail of cover-ups and refusal to admit fault.

This is a story that might seem to be long winded to focus on a single event in 1942 but in order to correct the imbalance that persists, even today, in the interests of completeness it is necessary to look back to the source of Japan’s belligerence in WW2. It is a long story that will appear in several episodes.

For weeks, something strange was happening in our little corner of the internet.

It wasn’t Redhead adjusting someone’s economic theory. It wasn’t a spirited debate over meat pies versus lamingtons. It wasn’t even one of those mornings when some of you arrive a bit grumpy because the world has done something silly again.

No.

We were being hammered.

Not by readers.Not by critics.Not by angry grandstand gurus.

But by machines.

Apparently, while we were chatting about life, liberty, common sense and the proper thickness of gravy, an army of aggressive bots and crawlers decided our humble blog was the most fascinating place on earth.

'So we marched into the sea and when we got out to about waist level they then machine gunned from behind."

The words of the sole survivor of the horrific massacre of  Radji Beach on Banka Island off the coast of Sumatra. 

On 16 February 1942, Japanese soldiers machine-gunned 22 Australian World War II Army nurses and killed 60 soldiers and crew members from 2 sunken ships. 

From the 22 Nurses shot on that day, there was only one sole survivor, Sister Vivian Bullwinkel.