[Marxism] Socialist Policy in World War Two

[Tom O'Lincoln]

Thanks Graham

A few replies are interspersed below.

>>It seems unreasonable to me to exaggerate Australia's position
in world affairs at any time.<<

Yes I agree. The same could be said of the Vietnam war, but that didn't stop 
us opposing the Australian war effort on anti-imperialist grounds.

>>You seem to have a equivocal position with respect to the defence of 
>>China,
in which the best fighters and partisans were no doubt Communists, and you
seem not to recognise that the conflict was in no way an 'inter-imperialist'
war, but a war to defend a semi-colonial country from a predatory 
invasion.<<

I can see it might seem that way, the result of shovelling a lot of material 
into an e-mail and thereby conflating several issues:

1. was the war as a whole anti-fascist? To which I made the point that there 
were fascists on the allied side.
2. were the Japanese war crimes worse than those of the allies? To which I 
made the point that Chiang Kai-shek was a mass murderer (as were British in 
Bengal and the  Americans in the skies over Japan).
3. was it imperialist on both sides? Which I think it was at the global 
level, but yes I would certainly make a qualification about China. Let's 
turn to that.

Yes it was also a national liberation struggle in China, but as you say the 
best fighters for liberation were the Communists, which is  one reason the 
American and Australian governments  hated them (because Washington and 
Canberra didn't give a fig for  Chinese liberation, on the contrary they 
feared it.)  Chiang meanwhile was chronically unable to mobilise the Chinese 
people against Japan despite the horrors inflicted by the Japanese  --  
because he was pretty horrible himself. And it's Chiang who was Australia's 
and America's ally.

Hypotheticals about invasion: Well who knows what  might have happened if 
Japan had won at Midway.The fact is they didn't, and at no time did they 
plan to invade Australia. So as a matter of empirical fact, the Australian 
war effort was at no time "defensive". Had circumstances changed, and with 
them the nature of the war, Marxists might have needed a different policy, 
but actually I doubt it. Try to seriously imagine Japan staging an invasion 
of this huge continent. What forces did they have?  As I pointed out, they 
were desperately stretched holding the territory they had already seized. In 
his book Green Armour, the war correspondent Osmar White described the 
Japanese forces in PNG around this time: "they were exhausted, diseased and 
starving. They had no combat air support, no artillery except a few mountain 
guns  hauled in pieces up and down muddy precipices, no transport planes to 
drop them food."  Any attempt to take this force to Australia would have 
been madness. They couldn't even take Port Moresby.

There is in fact a military historian (Theodore Cook) who has written a 
"counter-factual" about the consequences of a Japanese victory at Midway. 
Cook goes no further than to say that Australia risked 'being completely cut 
off', not  invaded. [Cook, Theodore (1999) 'Our Military Midway Disaster' in 
Cowley, Robert  (ed) What if? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have 
Been, MacMillan, London, p. 328.]  This is consistent with the proponderance 
of serious scholarship, which sees the Japanese hoping to establish a 
southern perimeter in PNG. They would have loved to isolate Australia from 
the US, not as prelude to a lunatic invasion, but because it was the only 
way to stop the industrially vastly stronger Americans from using Australia 
as a base for a crushing offensive  sooner or later.