The 18th Australian Infantry Brigade returned from the Buna and Sanananda campaigns a victorious but physically broken force. It had suffered more than 96 per cent casualties owing to a combination of weather, terrain, disease and the enemy, and would have to reconstruct the foundations of the brigade, built around a core of experienced veterans and the assimilation of motorised troops and replacement soldiers.1 The 18th Brigade would have to start building basic soldiering skills, the integration of jungle warfare lessons learnt, and the introduction of formal brigade leadership schools. This is also the period when the brigade undergoes a dramatic reorganisation under 7th Division’s establishment as a jungle division, which was outlined in chapter 1.

The Australian Army served in numerous theatres and campaigns throughout World War II, earning distinction and at times facing significant challenges. After Australia declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Australians deployed and served in combined Allied armies in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.1 Conversely, the Australian Army made up the bulk of Allied ground forces in the South West Pacific Area (SWPA) during the Japanese push south in the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the consolidation of their initial advances, the Japanese extended their area of control and established a perimeter line of defence from the Aleutians in the north to the Gilbert and Marshalls in the south. In 1942–43, Australian troops carried the bulk of responsibility in the fight against the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in a gruelling battle for the island of New Guinea. Thus, by 1943, the Australian Army was the most experienced Allied force in the Pacific.

The newly reorganised 18th Infantry Brigade Group (Jungle) would return to New Guinea with the 7th Infantry Division as the division’s reserve force. From the reserve force to the spearhead of the Allied campaign in the Finisterre Range, the brigade would achieve a striking victory against the Japanese 78th Infantry Regiment. This was a battle that required a commander and brigade staff to manage numerous attached units, supporting arms and its own infantry formations – all while assaulting up mountainous ridgelines to fortified Japanese positions. The Finisterre campaign, specifically Operation Cutthroat, demonstrated an excellent example of an Australian infantry brigade group (jungle) in action.

Australian interest in New Guinea, which first became significant in the 1870’s, was abundantly justified from the point of view of national security by the events of the war against Japan. New Guinea became plainly the last rampart protecting the Australian mainland from invasion and the recognition of this, heightened by the personal experience of the island gained by thousands of servicemen, persisted in Australian minds after the war. There is now a very much wider awareness of New Guinea as an element in the national situation and some New Guinea matters have unprecedently become national political issues in the postwar period: the question of the use of Manus as an American base, the Bulolo timber inquiry, the retirement by the Commonwealth Government of the first post-war Administrator, and the proposed use by the United States Navy of Japanese technicians in a survey of New Guinea waters.

Australia’s interests in its external territories can conceivably have an influence on Australia’s international relations, depending on what amount of truth there is in the assertion that nowadays foreign policy and colonial policy are interconnected and interacting. These connections and reactions, however, are usually very difficult to trace and to document since they exist only in the highest national councils and behind closed doors. So far as New Guinea and Nauru in the period under review are concerned, the repercussions of Australian policy in these territories on Australian foreign policy do not seem to have been very significant. There are two main fields in which such repercussions might be felt: in Australia’s relations with the United Nations and in regard to specific international issues such as the West New Guinea question; these fields are covered more directly in other chapters in this book, and here attention is confined to an examination of those aspects of Australian “colonial” policy in New Guinea and Nauru which may have had a bearing on international relations.

Australia is a product and an agent of empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Australian colonies experimented with ‘sub-imperialism’, an expansionist project obstructed by the fact that the ‘self-governing’ white settler colonies of the British empire lacked external sovereignty. This chapter begins with the Australian colonies’ interdependence with and aspirations to annex ‘adjacent islands’ in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the construction and administration of a Pacific empire beginning with the annexation of the Territory of Papua, to the administration of New Guinea and Nauru as League of Nations C Mandates and then as United Nations Trust Territories. Law proved an indispensable tool of Australian empire-building, producing complex relations of economic and cultural domination and resistance in Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. Amid the significant re-alignments produced by World War II, Australia attempted to renovate its empire in order to retain it. A professionalised administration of Australia’s territories and the regulation of legal citizenship were met with increasing Indigenous resistance and activism for real self-determination. Although decolonization in the later twentieth century brought Australian empire to an official end, the legacies of those expansionist aspirations continue to shape the Commonwealth’s legal, political and economic relationships with islands and communities in the Pacific region.

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

On 20 March 1939 the Burns Philp ship MV Macdhui docked at Port Moresby in the Australian territory of Papua. On board was the 13th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery. Commanded by Major Kenneth Chalmers, the battery had been raised from permanent gunners in Sydney and had the task of installing and operating two 6-inch coast guns at Paga Point, Port Moresby. Less than four months earlier, on 6 December 1938, the Minister for Defence, Geoffrey Street, as part of a series of measures to strengthen Australian defences after the Munich crisis, had announced funding for the development of Port Moresby as ‘a base for mobile naval and air forces’.

Australia entered the Second World War with considerable experience of coalition warfare, mainly based on the events of the First World War. Reflecting its recent history as a group of separate British colonies, by the First World War the new nation had not developed a foreign service and had little capacity for independent strategic decision-making. The Australian Government learned that its troops had landed at Gallipoli four days after the event; it had not even been advised, let alone consulted. By the last year of the war, however, the Australian Prime Minister was sitting in the Imperial War Cabinet, although this was not a permanent arrangement. Similarly, at the operational level, the formations of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) became part of the wider Empire’s military forces and were deployed and employed by British commanders, who rarely consulted the senior Australian commanders. But by the last year of the war senior Australian commanders had learned to scrutinise the plans of their British superiors. Coalition warfare is therefore essentially about strategy and command.

Ultimately, strategy is decided by the government, which might or might not accept the views of its military advisers. In Australia, during February 1941 there were a number of remarkable meetings of the Advisory War Council and of the War Cabinet that resulted in a change in attitude towards the threat from Japan, and soon after to a change in Australian strategy. This is not to suggest that the magnitude of the Japanese threat had not previously been realised. Indeed, in December 1940 the Australian Government had offered to send a brigade to Malaya, and Prime Minister Robert Menzies had decided to visit London to press for reinforcements for the Far East. But the meetings in February saw a heightening of the concern about Japan and, more particularly, revealed a greater role for the non-government members of the Advisory War Council. The council had been formed the previous year to involve members of the Opposition in the management of the Australian war effort.

The brilliantly successful but nonetheless hard-fought and bloody campaign in New Guinea in 1943 received considerable publicity at the time and has been the subject of a series of historical accounts over the succeeding decades. The story of the development of Australian strategy in the context of Allied strategy during this period has, however, received less attention. But no military campaign is conducted in a political and strategic vacuum. The New Guinea campaign was the outcome of strategic decisions by American and British political and military leaders made in conferences on the other side of the world. The nature of Australia’s contribution was determined, within Allied strategy, by political and military leaders meeting far to the south in Canberra and Brisbane. This chapter examines Australia’s role in trying to influence Allied strategy and how it decided its own strategy in 1943.

A theory developed from New Guinea ethnography that finds status competition to be a conflict-management system also appears to apply to medieval England, where the system was monopolized by elites, and to quotidian life in contemporary Britain, albeit with a reduced reach and through an additional, novel avenue to status. These findings are deployed to discuss viable policy options for moderating environmentally damaging consumption in the contemporary world.