HISTORICAL SOURCE MATERIAL

This historical source material includes books, published articles, web-sites, and seminar papers. Dr Peter Stanley's revisionist denials that Australia faced a grave threat from Japan in 1942 are listed below "Web-sites"

BOOKS

"Japan's Southward Advance and Australia", Professor Henry Frei (1991).

The late Professor Henry Frei was a distinguished Japan scholar. He expertise lay in Japanese history and his research was greatly assisted by his mastery of the Japanese language, both written and spoken. His very authoritative work Japan's Southward Advance and Australia is a highly respected historical source in relation to Japanese attitudes to Australia in 1942.

"Hawaii under the Rising Sun", by Professor J.J. Stephan (1984).

Professor Stephan is an internationally recognized expert on Japanese history. He is also fluent in written and spoken Japanese, and has lectured on Japanese military history, including Japan's plans for conquest after Pearl Harbor, at the National Defence College at Tokyo and at prestigious Japanese universities. Professor Stephan is held in high regard as an historian by leading Japanese military historians such as Ikuhiko Hata.

"Hirohito and the making of modern Japan" , Professor Herbert P. Bix (2000).

This Pulitzer prize winning history is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how the Japanese military high Command was created, its relationship to Emperor Hirohito, and how it functioned in relation to Japan's war planning and operations in 1941 and 1942.

"Midway -The Battle that doomed Japan", by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya (1958).

Captain Mitsuo Fuchida led the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and Darwin. His work was for many years regarded as an important historical source in relation to Japan's war planning in 1941-42. Fuchida and Okumiya were both present at the Battle of Midway. After Midway, Fuchida was assigned to the Naval War College. Commander Okumiya was assigned to Navy General Staff. Captain Fuchida's descriptions of aspects of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese defeat at Midway have been challenged by senior Japanese naval officers who also participated in those actions. The two Japanese authors dismissed as a mere war game scenario the very important third purpose of Japan's Operation Midway, which was the capture of Hawaii and imposition of Japanese domination on the whole of the central and western Pacific. As a result, the standing of these Japanese authors as accurate reporters of Japan's strategic planning in 1942 and observers of historic battles has long been questioned by many Japanese military historians. Western military historians are also beginning to question the reliability of Fuchida and Okumiya.

PUBLISHED ARTICLES

"Defending Australia in 1942", Professor David Horner (1993).

Professor Horner is a leading Australian military historian and an internationally recognized expert on the Pacific War. This article was published in War & Society (May 1993), a journal of the Department of History, University of New South Wales. "Defending Australia in 1942" is essential reading for anyone wishing to appreciate the full extent of the peril facing Australia in 1942.

WEB-SITES

As convener of the Battle for Australia Historical Society and Pacific War Historical Society, I created and maintain their extensive historical web-sites. I have provided brief accounts of Japanese and American strategic aims and war planning on this Battle for Australia web-site and also on the Pacific War web-site.

PUBLISHED PAPERS (ARTICLES & SEMINAR)

ACCESS TO DR PETER STANLEY'S PAPERS:

Dr Stanley first began to pursue his revisionist campaign to deny the gravity of the danger faced by Australia in 1942 in a paper delivered at an Australian War Memorial conference in 2002 called "Remembering 1942". The paper was titled "He's (not) coming South: The Invasion that wasn't".The title of Dr Stanley's 2002 paper, with the word "not" inserted in brackets is intended to convey his rejection of an assertion by a 1942 Curtin government poster depicting a Japanese soldier in threatening pose with bayonet pointed at the viewer. The poster was titled "He's coming South". The thrust of Dr Stanley's first paper was that the Japanese were never planning to invade Australia in 1942 and that the Curtin wartime government exploited a non-existent threat of Japanese invasion for political advantage.http://www.awm.gov.au/events/conference/2002/index.htm

A copy of "He's (not) coming South" can be downloaded from the Australian War Memorial's index of conferences and seminars. In the list of speakers at the 2002 History Conference "Remembering 1942", Dr Stanley's paper "He's (not) coming South" is listed under the title "Australia under threat of invasion":

Essentially, Dr Stanley repeats these controversial claims in a second paper published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Griffith Review and titled "Threat made manifest". In this second paper, he describes the desire of Australians to believe that their country faced a grave threat from Japan in 1942 as "rather pathetic".

In a final paper delivered before his sudden resignation from the Australia War Memorial, and entitled "Was there a Battle for Australia?", Dr Peter Stanley confirms that the thrust of all three papers by him is to deny that there is any historical foundation for the Australian Government to commemorate the Battle for Australia 1942-43. In this paper, Dr Stanley abandons most of the outlandish arguments that were put forward in his two earlier papers and shown to be lacking any credible historical foundation. His wafer-thin arguments for denying that there was a Battle for Australia now include the failure of the Japanese in 1942 to refer to a Battle for Australia. This absence of mention is hardly surprising because the Japanese plan to isolate Australia from the United States and force its surrender to Japan was assigned the code reference "Operation FS".

Dr Peter Stanley's revisionist claims about 1942 and Prime Minister John Curtin are shown to lack any credible historical foundation on this web-site beginning at the chapter "Confronting a false history of 1942 promoted by the Australian War Memorial".

"Japanese air operations over New Guinea during the Second World War"

This paper by Hiroyuki Shindo was published in the Journal of the Australian War Memorial, issue No 34-June 2001. At the time of delivering this paper, Hiroyuki Shindo was an assistant professor in the Military History Department of the National Institute for Defense Studies, Tokyo. His special areas of interest are US-Japan diplomatic and military relations in the 1930s and 1940s, and the military history of the Second World War.

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