#BattleForAustralia #PacificWar #WW2History
In February 1942, Australians genuinely believed the Japanese were coming. Darwin was burning. Singapore had fallen. The Prime Minister of Japan stood up in parliament and demanded that Australia surrender. So here is the question this channel gets asked more than almost any other. Did Japan actually plan to invade Australia?
This documentary answers it from the paper - the Imperial Japanese Navy's proposals, the Army's replies, and the secret diary of Imperial General Headquarters itself. There are no battles in this one. Just documents that survived the war, and the historians who have argued about them ever since. It is the story of a Navy that wanted to invade, an Army that refused, and a different plan - approved by the Emperor himself - that was aimed not at landing on Australia, but at strangling it.
Discover why the Japanese Army calculated it would need twelve divisions and shipping it simply did not have, why one senior staff officer wrote the word gibberish in the headquarters diary, what Operation FS was really designed to do to Australia, and how the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway killed the plan before a single soldier landed.
🔥 In this video:
February 1942: the fear on the home front as Darwin burned.
The Navy's Case: why Captain Tomioka argued Australia had to be taken.
The Army's Arithmetic: ten to twelve divisions and 1.5 million tons of shipping.
Gibberish: the line in the secret diary that decided the argument.
Operation FS: the Emperor-approved plan to strangle Australia, and how Coral Sea and Midway ended it.
Sources of Where I get my facts:
Stanley, P. (2008) Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942. Camberwell: Viking.
Frei, H.P. (1991) Japan's Southward Advance and Australia: From the Sixteenth Century to World War II. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Bullard, S. (trans.) (2007) Japanese Army Operations in the South Pacific Area: New Britain and Papua Campaigns, 1942-43. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.
Horner, D. (1978) Crisis of Command: Australian Generalship and the Japanese Threat, 1941-1943. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Grey, J. (2008) A Military History of Australia. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Disclaimer: This video is a historical documentary intended for educational purposes.
#BattleForAustralia #PacificWar #WW2 #AustralianHistory #MilitaryHistory #History #Japan1942 #ImperialJapan
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