Those who call 1942 ‘Australia’s most perilous year’ are not guilty of over-dramatisation. It was, after all, the year when Japan’s aircraft blasted Darwin off the map; when her submarines entered Sydney Harbour, sank a ship and shelled the shoreline; when air raids were happening around Townsville, and Australian ships were being sunk off our coast. It was the year when our best military and air forces were engaged far away in Africa and Europe; when ‘impregnable’ Singapore fell, ending long-held illusions of an Australia safe beneath the imperial British umbrella. It was the year in which a proud Australian fighting force began years of cruel captivity. It was the year John Curtin, acknowledging a brute fact of life, placed Australia’s forces under US command; the year we managed (with massive US help) to hang on by a whisker in New Guinea, ‘the nearest’ – in the words of the Duke of Wellington – ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.
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