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BATTLES
FOR THE CORAL SEA
Chapter 17 from Japan to the Rescue,
Australian Security around the Indonesian Archipelago during he American
Century
Heinemann,
1991, pp. 285-94.
...
the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.
Wellington
recalling Waterloo
Linked
to the conviction that the Imperial Japanese Army intended to invade the
mainland of Australia in 1942 is the belief that only a US naval victory
at the Battle of the Coral Sea, fought between 7 and 8 May that year,
prevented invasion.
Despite
the vaunted position that the Battle of the Coral Sea occupies in
Australian consciousness, there is no clear-cut answer to who won that
engagement. All that can be given with certainty are the losses suffered
at the time. The US Navy lost the carrier Lexington, the destroyer Sims
and the supply tanker Neosho; the carrier Yorktown was badly damaged but
capable of repair after forty-eight hours intensive labour. (Spector,
1987: 162) The Imperial Japanese Navy lost the small carrier Shoho and
had its fleet carrier Shokaku so badly damaged that it was not able to
rejoin the fleet at Midway f our weeks later. Japan also lost
irreplaceable planes and pilots. On the ships sunk or disabled, the
Japanese narrowly won the Battle of the Coral Sea, a fact which Allied
naval historians have never denied, equivocate though they do about the
strategic significance of Japan’s win.
At
the time, as is common, both sides declared a famous victory. The New
York Times reported between seventeen and twenty-two enemy ships
sunk or crippled and the remaining Japanese vessels put to flight with
the Allies in joyous pursuit. On the other side, reports of a Japanese
success roared through the entire Imperial fleet, nourishing the hubris
that helped bring about the disaster at Midway on 4-6 June when four
Japanese carriers were sunk. The material and psychological consequences
of the Battle of the Coral Sea were greater at Midway than at Moresby.
Excessive claims about the damage done were encouraged by the un-precedented
nature of the battle in which the opposing ships never sighted each
other. All the attacks were carried out by seaborne aircraft; each pilot
claimed that his bombs had sunk a particular ship, thus multiplying the
reported damage. Believing the Lexington destroyed at Peal Harbour, the Japanese wrongly
identified the carrier they hit at Coral Sea as the Saratoga. (Fuchida
and Okimiya, 1958: 98 & 100)
Australian
newspapers reproduced press releases from MacArthur’s headquarters
about massive Japanese losses: ‘one aircraft carrier, one heavy
crusier, one light cruiser, two destroyers, four gunboats
and a supply ship’, as well as another carrier probably sunk
and four more ships damaged. A slightly more accurate account became
available four days later but was not published. The extent of US
American losses was also kept from the public. On 13 May, the Advisory
War Council in Canberra summed up the results of the Battle of the Coral
Sea as ‘rather disappointing’ because even advance information had
not allowed a sufficient concentration of Allied forces to achieve
‘complete victory. As it was, an opportunity to inflict losses on the
enemy was lost’. (quoted Gill, 1968: 55)
The
Japanese high command, while exhilarated by reports of their latest
success, also felt that its fleet should have achieved more. Despite low
fuel reserves, the Japanese ships were ordered to put about and resume
their attack on the US vessels that had cleared the area – the reality
at the day’s end being exactly the opposite of the report in the New
York Times. (Toland, 1970: 324)
Although
the balance at sea ran slightly in favour of the Japanese forces,
judgement of the engagement’s longer-term implications requires
careful delineation of pre-battle objectives and post-battle
capabilities. Allied commentators have based their claim of a
‘strategic victory for the Allies’ on the failure of the Japanese
fleet to escort an invasion force to Port Moresby. On that point there
can be no disagreement. The Coral Sea was the first time in six months
of fighting that a large-scale Japanese advance had been checked in
combat. Its impact on Allied morale cannot be doubted, no matter how
exaggerated the evidence on which that stimulus was based.
If
the significance of the Coral Sea battle is to be judged by Japan’s
capacity to attack Port Moresby, a longer perspective is required. A
seaborne invasion of Moresby scheduled for March had been postponed
because only land-based air support had been available to deal with the
US task force sighted in the area. After the Coral Sea, the seaborne
attack was gain postponed, not cancelled. When the defeat at Midway on
4-6 June made the resumption of a seaward invasion on Moresby ever more
improbable, the army responded by driving over the Owen Stanley Ranges.
By 16 September, ill-equipped Japanese had pushed the Australians back
to within thirty miles of the coast. If occupation of Moresby held the
key to Australia’s security, that risk was not removed until 26
September when the Japanese army reluctantly pulled back its starving
and exhausted survivors. (MacArthur, 1966: 165)
Conclusions
about the strategic outcome of the Battle of the Coral Sea are muddied
by the Australian assumption that the Japanese command was planning an
invasion of continental Australia for which the occupation of Moresby is
seen as a necessary prelude. An invasion had been rejected in March.
When the Japanese regional command sent its force towards Port Moresby
from Rabaul on 4 May 1942, it had long-term objectives quite different
from those still supposed by many Australians. For Admiral Inoue, the
capture of Port Moresby was one more step towards establishing a line of
interdependent bases form the Solomons to the Netherlands East Indies.
Inoue feared that, without this perimeter under his control, land-based
aircraft could be launched form Moresby against Rabaul or Truk. The
security of Japanese forces would be further enhanced by using that
chain of airfields to make interdictory raids on northern Australia and
into the Coral Sea to preempt US assaults. Japanese occupation of
Moresby would have increased the intensity of air attack on north
Queensland to prevent a built-up of US and Australian forces for a
counterattack. Inoue’s aim in launching the offensive of 4 May was to
fill gaps in his perimeter. He was heading east and west, not south.
If
the events of 7-8 May are seen in light of Japanese objectives, and not
in terms of Australia’s fears, the return of transports to Rabaul is
not so clear cut a strategic reversal as allied writers have wanted to
believe. Withdrawing the transports late on 7 May preserved their troops
for the landward assaults during September. Even the catastrophe at
Midway did not stop Japanese naval victories in the south-west Pacific
since the Imperial Navy won the Battle of Savo Island in August and the
Battle of Santa Cruz Islands late in October 1942. (Toland, 1970: 362
& 409)
Japan’s
push on Moresby did not end early in May 1942 but continued with a
two-pronged plan to advance by land and by sea. As far as the Japanese
strategists were concerned, a seaward invasion had been delayed only
until the Coral Sea could be cleared of Allied shipping. That day never
came.
The
complexities of assessing the outcome in the Coral Sea continue to
bedevil scholarship. One venerable specialist, Norman Harper, managed to
get almost nothing right: ‘The Battle of Coral Sea on 8 May 1942
checked the southward thrust of the Japanese navy and ended the danger
of a sea attack on the Australian mainland’. (Harper, 1987: 112) By
restricting the date of the engagement to 8 May, Harper excluded the
sinking on 7 May of the light carrier Shoko, the loss of which brought
on the decision once more to postpone the invasion of Moresby. It is
difficult to understand what Harper meant by the threat of a sea attack
on the Australian mainland. An invasion had been rejected by the
Japanese in March, while the midget submarines raid on Sydney and the
shelling of Sydney and Newcastle took place four weeks after Harper
claimed ‘the danger of a sea attack’ had ended. (Long, 1973: 193)
When
distinguished professors produce such fallacious summaries, it is hardly
surprising that the popular press is often guilty of reconfirming the
public in the morale-boosting view put out in 1942. One reason for this
confusion is that the propaganda uses of a US ‘victory’ did not end
with the defeat of Japanese in 1945 but flourished after 1950 as part of
the Cold War. They provided an ideological foundation for the ANZUS
alliance and for our hosting the US military communications and spy
bases. At the core of this propaganda have been the Coral Sea Week
celebrations.
THAT
WEEK THAT WASN’T
The initial Coral Sea Week celebration in 1946 combined a fund-raising
charity ball with an invited luncheon address by the Australian-American
Association’s president, R.G. Casey, anti-Labor ex-politician and
first Australian minister to Washington in 1940. The Association also
began educating the general public who ‘even today do not seem to
realise’ the importance of the battle that ‘saved Australia from
becoming one the bloody and ravaged battle fields of the war’.
Australia’s historical consciousness had to be reminded of its debt to
the US of A through services in schools, displays in shop windows and
the flying of flags from public buildings. An editorial in the
conservative Melbourne Argus (8.5.46) recognised that although
‘memories are short’, commemorating the Battle of the Coral Sea
would ‘encourage Anglo-American cooperation in shaping the future.’
Coral
Sea commemorative celebrations were the creature of the
Australian-American Association, which had been formed in 1936 to
encourage anti-isolationist forces in the US of A. After the war the
Association again tried to keep the US involved in global security as a
backstop for the battered British Empire. The Association’s president,
Chief Justice Sir John Latham, noted in a 1951 letter to Prime Minister
Menzies: ‘… it is of very great importance … that … the United
States-Australian, and inferentially Empire relations should be given
official acknowledgement at least once a year and that Coral Sea Week is
the best possible occasion to do this’. (AA CRS 463/17) Until the
1950s, the Association’s supporters could avoid choosing between
Britain and the US of A. For Australia, the Association aimed to secure
permanent US protection against aggression from a revengeful and rearmed
Japan, communist aggression and the chaos surrounding de-colonisation in
India and Indonesia.
Commanded
by one of the founders of the Australian-American Association, Sir Keith
Murdoch, the Melbourne Herald fired a broadside in the 1946 campaign to
establish the facts about the Coral Sea battle in Australia’s popular
memory. For the paper’s ‘Special Correspondent’, the Japanese had
aimed to take Port Moresby before heading ‘south for Townsville and
the coastline north of Brisbane. Neither task, the Japanese have
admitted since, was reckoned as difficult.’ After this imaginative
beginning, the writer gave strategic direction of the sea battle, not to
Admiral Nimitz, but to General MacArthur who had long before been fixed
in the minds of Herald
readers as the savior of Australia. (The battle was fought just inside
MacArthur’s command boundaries but by ships under Ninitz’s control;
MacArthur complained that operational cooperation had been
unsatisfactory.) A few paragraphs later, Australia was saved from
invasion after the Japanese lost ‘one big aircraft carrier, three
heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, three destroyers, five transports,
and other small vessels, in addition to many damaged.’ (Herald,
4.5.460 This almost entirely erroneous account harked back to the
original misleading reports for its ‘facts’.
Coral
Sea Week organisers gained precious little support from Prime Minister
Chifley who declined to have Commonwealth Government buildings fly
flags. Questioned in the House on the eve of the 1947 anniversary.
Chifley again avoided involvement, stressing that ‘Remembrance Day and
Anzac Day have been specially dedicated each year to commemorate our
participation in the world wars.’ (CPD, 7.5.47)
Unlike
Anzac Day, which it closely followed on the calendar, Coral Sea Week was
celebratory rather than solemn, aiming to provide the best night out of
the year. Gallipoli had been a heroic defeat where failure heightened
the appeal to nobility, a sentiment found also in Bushido, Japan’s
code of chivalry. (Morris, 1976) No advocate of Australian military
greatness ever pretended that the Turks had withdrawn. In contrast, the
Coral Sea story has always depended on oversimplification,
misinformation and deception. Gallipoli’s installation as the focal
point of Australian memories of the Great European War had been assisted
by its being the first major engagement of Australian soldiers anywhere.
Even if the Battle of Coral Sea had achieved what its promoters claimed
and saved Australia from invasion, its position as the focus for
memories of the Second World War would still have faced competition from
other engagements and campaigns, from Tobruk to Kokoda. Moreover,
Australian participation in the Coral Sea was marginal. During a fight
where the opposing ships never came closer than 240 kilometers there was
not much that cruisers like HMAS Hobart
and Australia could do. From the standpoint of Australian valour, the
Battle of the Coral Sea was a non-event. This passivity made the Coral
Sea the ideal clash of arms through which to demonstrate how dependent
Australia had to be on the US military.
Although
Australian warships had played next-to-no part in the fighting, the
Naval Board recognised that annual Coral Sea celebrations would give
their service a prominence not available from Anzac legends. Chifley’s
reluctance to promote Coral Sea Week came out of a treasurer’s
suspicion that the Naval Board’s enthusiasm suited its campaign to get
even more money. (AA, CRS 463/17) During 1949, the Chifley government
finally got caught up in the celebrations through a curious process that
betrays the fine Italian hand of R.G. Casey and his manner of wielding
influence. Having had direct outside requests rebuffed, Casey asked
Labor Immigration minister Arthur Calwell, always proud of his
Pennsylvania ancestry, to approach Chifley informally with a proposal to
invite a US naval unit Australia for Coral Sea Week in 1950. After Casey
intimated to several ministers that he already had the support of their
colleagues, cabinet decided on 4 July 1949 to issue the invitation. (AA,
CRS 463/170 Failure to do so would not have looked good in an election
year when Casey was Liberal Party president and a candidate.
Before
the close of 1949 the strategic topography of post-war Asia changed with
Mao Zedong’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, the
Soviet Union’s testing of an atomic bomb and the withdrawal of the
Dutch from all of their East Indies territories except Papua Barat. As a
result, Japan ceased to be the despised enemy and was on its way to
becoming a de facto ally
of the US of A. (Rotter, 1986) US authorities remained shy of alliances
that limited their freedom of response in the Pacific. Hoping to rebind
US armed might to Australia’s defence, the Menzies government signed
the Peace Treaty with Japan as one strand of a maritime alliance
anchored by the ANZUS Treaty. On 22 January 1952, Sir Percy Spender, an
architect of ANZUS and by then Australia’s Ambassador to Washington,
assured the Secretary of State that Coral Sea Week ‘celebrations this
year will derive added significance from the recent signature of the
Tripartite Security Pact.’ (AA, CRS 57/314)
R.G.
Casey became Minister for Supply and Development in December 1949 and
soon rallied cabinet colleagues around government involvement in Coral
Sea Week celebrations. A State Department assessment of the new
Australian government described Casey as ‘outstandingly friendly’.
(quoted Pemberton, 1987: 7) Casey’s personal relationships with
prominent US citizens had begun at Cambridge before the Great War when
he found them easier to get along with than the British students; he was
charmed to breakfast with ‘the richest man of his age in the world’,
Averell Harriman. (Hudson, 1986: 23) When Casey went to Cairo in 1942 he
left his children in the care of Dean Acheson, Secretary of State when
the ANZUS Treaty was negotiated in 1951. As Australia’s External
Affairs minister from 1951 to 1960, Casey leant towards the US more than
did Prime Minister Menzies, as evidenced by their split over Suez in
1956. (Martin, 1989)Propaganda was never far from Casey’s thoughts and
he used ASIO to try to censor the letters to the editor published in the
Age. Promotion of the Coral Sea Week celebrations was one more instance
of what his biographer coyly describes as Casey’s lifelong ‘interest
in intelligence and counter-subversion’ (Hudson, 1986: 50), detailed
revelations of which (Toohey & Pinwell, 1989) led to the sanitizing
of his unpublished diaries in the National Library. (Age, 2.8.89)
The
change of government in Canberra facilitated switching the Chifley
invitation – declined by the US fleet – into a request for the
participation of the commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral
P.W. Radford, as the first designated Coral Sea guest. The quickened
significance of the Coral Sea celebrations for Pacific strategy was
underscored by official conversations between Admiral Radford and the
Australian ministers for the Navy and for Air concerning the naval
aviation equipment required for maritime surveillance from the
mid-Indian Ocean across to the far-west Pacific. Admirals Radford and
Collins finalized this network at Pearl Harbour in February 1951 to
provide the ANZUS partners with their only continuing operational
arrangements. (Young, 1988) Radford sat with members in the House of
Representatives to hear Menzies say that the US sailors were welcome at
any time in any Australian city, town or countryside.
In
1948, with New York’s Cardinal Spellman as its unofficial quest of
honour (NLA, MS 6150), the Association had received approval in
principle for the erection of a memorial somewhere in Canberra to
commemorate the US contribution to the defence of Australia. In 1950
Menzies launched an appeal for £50,000. Before the 80-metre column was
erected, the government and public contributed £113, 000 to the
Australian-American Association’s campaign. The ceremony marking the
start of construction on 10 March 1953 coincided with discussions for a
draft treaty of friendship with the US of A: care was taken to have both
negotiating teams attend to impress the US side with the depth of
Australian gratitude. (AA, CRS A 462/1) Queen Elizabeth II unveiled the
finished memorial on 16 February 1954, her presence distracting from how
the US of A had displaced Great Britain as Australia’s greatest and
most powerful friend. Four years later the government reinforced this
connection by deciding to erect the Australian Defence Department
offices beneath the US eagle clasping the globe in its talons.
Through
a web of personal and political friendships, the Australian-American
Association acted as if it were a section of the Department of External
Affairs, selecting the guest and organising his itinerary while the
government picked up the bill. (AA, CRS 463/17) Its 1952 guest embodied
the anti-communist twist given to what had been a battle in the war
against fascism. General Eichelberger had commanded US troops in
Siberia, fighting along the Japanese army during the 1918-21 wars of
intervention to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime. After retiring as
Eighth Army commander in 1948, Eichelberger joined forces with the
American Council on Japan (ACJ), which had been formed under the aegis
of Newsweek and its principal shareholder, US Secretary of Commerce
Averell Harriman, to oppose breaking up the Japanese monopolies.
Eichelberger became ‘the first and foremost promoter of Japanese
rearmament’, arguing ‘that a large army in Japan … “would
doubtless act as a powerful deterrent to Soviet expansion in the West”
…’. Employed as a
consultant with the Assistant Secretary of the Army, he ‘served as the
principal liaison between the ACJ and top Washington officials., such as
George F. Kennan, who adopted Eichelberger’s ideas in drafting
National Security Council document 13/2 of October 1948. That document
proposed that a remilitarised and economically revived Japan become the
basis for US containment along the ‘Great Crescent’ through
Indonesia and around to India. (Schonberger, 1977: 343-8)
Eichelberger’s press interviews in Australia were silent on the future
of Japan. As ex-commander of the force that had retaken Buna he
emphasised that ‘New Guinea should be built up into a bastion of
Australian defence’. (SMH, 27.4.52)
As
a propaganda focus for justifying Australia’s ‘declaration of
dependence’ (Barclay, 1985: 79) to the Australian people, Coral Sea
Week found its greatest success. When protests against Australian
military involvement in Vietnam increased during 1966, Defence Minister
Fairhall assured the cabinet that ‘people won’t dare to throw away
the value of the USA alliance when they recall the Coral Sea Battle’.
(Howson, 1984: 218)
Although
circumstance has changed several aspects of Coral Sea Week celebrations,
their one immutable element has been the inability of the media to
report accurately what happened on 7-8 May 1942. Because ‘memories are
short’, the press continues to publish feature articles to remind the
public of what the Coral Sea meant. Sydney’s Daily
Telegraph combined its 1984 commemoration of the battle with
homage to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth wherein Oceania’s endless
victories over Eurasia were manufactured. Readers learnt that ‘the
Japanese fleet, with much heavier losses, was finished. The enemy’s
surviving ships were in full retreat’. (7.5.84) Far from being in full
retreat , ‘the Task Force consequently turned south again and sought
to reestablish contact, without success, until sundown on 10 May’, (MacArthur,
1966: 138), that is, two days after the US fleet had withdrawn.
Popular
reports have rarely relied on official Allied writings. Even when the
Canberra Times got the outcome of the sea battle correct, it drew a
false conclusion about the battle’s wider significance by claiming
‘a strategic victory for US and Australian forces, with Australia
secured against Japanese attack.’ (4.5.88) If ‘attack’ means
invasion, then that was never part of the Japanese purpose; it
‘attack’ means running assault who, if not the Imperial Japanese
Navy, shelled Newcastle and Sydney four weeks later?
Perennial
disregard for the evidence has enabled the promoters of the Coral Sea
Week celebrations to snatch ‘victory’ from the gums of what,
charitably, might be described as a ‘near run thing’ for the Allies.
The lasting victors have been the US State and Defence Departments,
which have been able to treat Australia as a suitable piece of real
estate for military bases and from which to recruit troops for wars
against Korea and Vietnam. Canberra’s rationale for the US-Australian
alliance has always been that ‘they saved us’ from the Japanese and
that we should be gratefully respectful so that the US of A will deliver
us from future enemies. Throughout this charade, falsification of the
objectives and outcome of the Battle of the Coral Sea has been
invaluable.
For
a detailed account of Coral Sea Week celebrations focused on the city
closest to the battle, Cairns, see my ‘Balls and Receptions:
Remembering the Battle that Saved Australia, 1942-1991’, The Battle of
the Coral Sea 1942, Conference Proceedings, Australian National Maritime
Museum, 1993, pp. 134-52.
For
the official reaction to the chapter in Japan to the Rescue see Tom
Frame’s contribution to this conference, pp. 153-160.
Abbreviations
AA
Australian
Archives
CPD Commonwealth
Parliamentary Debates
NLA National Library of
Australia
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