The ANZAC spirit, the Second Fleet and the birth of modern Australasia - Part 2
Excerpts from “Year 9 Modern History Textbook” by the Australasian Department of Education (actually written by@Hawkatana and @vilani99 )
Red May and the Fall of Washington lit a fire under London, Canberra, and Wellington. A country that could be relied on to either remain neutral or friendly in international affairs and one of, if not the most powerful economy in the world, had gone over to the Bolsheviks and become intractably hostile to Britain and its world spanning empire effectively overnight. While agreements with the Japanese bought time for the Commonwealth, the British Empire had to build up military capacity in the southwestern part of the Pacific, and fast. The first of these measures was inducing the Australian and New Zealand governments to pass the National Defence Acts of 1933. The Acts created provisions for the reintroduction of conscription, and expanded the area within which conscripts from both countries could be deployed from their home territories to an area spanning from Hong Kong to New Zealand’s Southern Island and from the Pitcairn Islands to Sri Lanka. In Australia, this transformed the part-time Militia and the small Permanent Military Force into the Australian Army, a military force planned to form up to 12 divisions in wartime, and an additional four brigades to the peacetime, five-division Army. New Zealand’s army also expanded its wartime size from three brigades to five. In addition, the new de facto Dominion of the Commonwealth of the Philippines also transformed the Philippine Constabulary and Philippine Scouts into a more proper military force, the Philippine Commonwealth Defense Force (PCDF). Through these measures, Britain made it clear that it expected its Dominions to contribute to the utmost to the defence of the Commonwealth.
However, it became apparent by early 1934 that this military buildup, in addition to increased deployment of Indian and British troops, became too much for the already overstretched GHQ India to handle. It became clear to many military and civilian officials that if a war in the Pacific suddenly broke out, GHQ India’s overstretched command structure may, at best, fray under the stress, and at worst, collapse entirely. In response, the Imperial General Staff created a new Command out of GHQ India, GHQ Pacific. Under the Commander-in-Chief Pacific based in Singapore, GHQ Pacific had operational authority over all Commonwealth army and air force activity east of Burma. Australasian, New Zealander and Philippine land forces were also organised under the Australia-New Zealand-Philippine Army Command (ANZPAC), with its headquarters in Manila, and was to provide the bulk of the soldiers in the region. Answering to ANZPAC was the I and II Australasian Army Corps (resurrected from the battlefields of the First World War) containing units from Australia and New Zealand. A notable part of this new Australasian Army Corps were the Australasian Divisions, built out of units taken from both countries. Additionally, the Philippines contributed the III Philippine Corps. The Pacific Dominions all gave considerable contributions to ANZPAC on paper but they also kept a considerable amount of their military strength at home. For example, the new Australian Army kept the prominent “First Five” of World War I’s Australian Imperial Force and two of the “Expansion Divisions” at home as the I and II Australian Corps, answering directly to the Australian General Staff. New Zealand only contributed a few scant brigades to ANZPAC, with the New Zealand Division only transferred in 1941, with the stipulation that it remain at home until a declaration of war. The vast majority of the PCDF also remained at home, where it became riddled with Concordist sympathisers and infiltrators. Additionally, both the Australian and New Zealand armies did not reach their full paper strength until January 1942, a full six months after both Dominions began conscription and mobilisation after GHQ Pacific announced a state of emergency due to Japanese units beginning to take up positions on the border with Hong Kong.
Of the millions of Chinese that migrated to Australasia over the five years from 1937 to the Commonwealth’s entry into the Second World War, none were more influential than HH Kung, TV Soong, and Liren Sun.
HH Kung was born in 1881 to a prominent family of bankers in Shanxi Province, where he attended a Mission School. After seeking an education at North China Union College, and navigating the complicated and dangerous world of North China in the lead up to and wake of the Boxer Rebellions, in 1901 he moved to the United States to attend Oberlin University, facing travails resulting from American anti-Asian racism (chiefly the Chinese Exclusion Act) on his journey to Ohio. While he continued his education after graduating from Oberlin, eventually attaining a M.A. in Economics from Yale, it was at Oberlin that he made the acquaintance that would forever alter his personal and political trajectory: Sun Yat-Sen.
Kung was broadly supportive of the 1911 Revolution, and served in an anti-government militia during the anti-Manchu uprisings in Shanxi. As the new Republic sputtered off into military dictatorship and warlordism, Kung emigrated to Japan. It was there that he once again met Sun Yat-Sen after he had been exiled after the Kuomintang’s failed revolution against Yuan Shikai. It was also there that he met and married his second wife, Soong Ai-ling. After Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, the KMT returned from their exile, and Kung returned to his home in Shanxi, then left for the the United States, Britain, and France in 1918, cultivating both business and political connections. After his return in 1919, he split time between the family business of banking and his educational efforts, until 1922, when Sun Yat-Sen enlisted his help to rebuild the Kuomintang and save China from warlordism.
Over the next few years, Kung served as an intermediary between Sun and the various local leaders and warlords in the north. He eventually joined the KMT in Guangdong in 1924, and accompanied Sun north to Beijing. In 1925, he was witness to Sun Yat-Sen’s brush with illness, his testament on 10 October, and his death on 24 November. While disquieted by his insistence on a United Front with the Communists, he fully supported the ascendancy of Wang Jingwei and Jiang Jieshi to the KMTs Duumvirate; they were after all his client and his brother-in-law.
Kung, while serving on many cabinet positions in the Wuhan Government (mostly in economics and development portfolios), soon fell in line with Jiang Jieshi’s right-wing faction within the KMT, sharing his wariness of their erstwhile Soviet (and later American) allies. There was a shared fear that an overreliance on both the Soviet Union and America would result in a China that remains under domination by foreign powers in the guise of “Social-Imperialism”. Kung, with the rest of the faction, remained in good graces with the rest of the party during Jiang’s heyday up to the end of the Northern Expedition, but the campaign’s stalling removed a good deal of their political capital. Eventually, Kung’s insistence on continuing a program of “hedging bets” by maintaining crucial financial and military ties with the British Commonwealth and France led to a dramatic falling out with Wang and he was soon stripped of his ministerial portfolio in January 1938, his only remaining position being a seat on the KMT’s Central Committee.
The next year, after the disastrous Battle of Shanghai and the rout from Nanjing to Wuhan to Chongqing, Jiang - Kung’s last remaining ally - disappeared, only to reemerge weeks later at the head of Japan’s client Reorganised Government as “Protector of the Chinese Nation.”
Suddenly left adrift in the morass of Chinese politics, Kung faced a tough choice; face the Japanese with his hated political enemies, join the Social Imperialists tearing the country apart, or leave China. No stranger to exile, Kung opted for the latter, using his connections with British and French politicians and financiers to secure a place for himself and his capital in the diasporal Chinese communities rapidly forming in Britain’s Pacific Dominions. When Kung landed at Sydney in January 1940, it was via the invitation of his protege and brother-in-law, TV Soong.
Born in Shanghai and educated at St Johns in Shanghai, Harvard, and Columbia University, TV Soong sat at the centre of KMT politics by ties of blood and marriage. By virtue of his sisters’ marriages, he was brother-in-law to HH Kung, Sun Yat-Sen, and Jiang Jieshi, the three most powerful men in the “New China”. Eventually joining the Wuhan Government, he worked for several posts in the nascent republic’s economic infrastructure, typically under his brother-in-law HH Kung. Soong, alongside Kung, soon developed ties within British, French, and pre-revolutionary American finance, industry, and politics. These ties, along with his reaction to the Red May Revolution in America, lead to Soong’s anti-communism, despite America joining the Soviet Union in backing the United Front between the KMT and CCP.
As the KMT’s factionalism became intractable in the 1930s, he found himself aligned with neither his sister Soong Ching-ling’s left-wing faction nor his brother-in-law Jiang Jieshi’s right-wing faction. By attempting to remain aloft of the increasingly vicious internal party struggles, Soong soon found himself alienated from almost every major player within the KMT except for HH Kung, who, along with being his brother-in-law, had become something of a mentor. Soong’s small centre faction soon saw itself being increasingly marginalised as the feuds between Jiang, Soong Ching-ling, and Wang Jingwei increasingly polarised Nanjing political circles, splitting the KMT into irreconcilable camps. Furthermore, the realities of the United Front with the Communist Party of China had led to the KMT aligning with Moscow and Deleon-Debs. Soong’s deep anti-communism eventually led to a disastrous falling out with his increasingly communist-sympathetic sister, and the two had not been on speaking terms for almost a year when he finally left Nanjing for Hong Kong in 1935.
When the brushfire wars against the northern warlords began to escalate, Soong saw the writing on the wall, and took advantage of his connections with British and Australian financiers and moved to Hong Kong in 1935. After renewing his ties with his European associates, he decided to move to Sydney in 1937. From there, he began an energetic effort in organising the Chinese population in Australia, ingratiating himself (and them by proxy) with the Australian and New Zealand governments. He even expended the last of his political capital back in China to create an agency to route internal refugees from the conflicts in the north through Shanghai and to Australia and New Zealand. This would lead to a near tripling of the flow of immigrants when the war against Japan and the warlords escalated in 1939, creating an internal refugee crisis in China. All the while, he built a network of financial and political machinery centred around a core of businesses he had founded and bought in Sydney and Brisbane. Soong invested heavily in growing his businesses in Australia, and he was able to use the income from these investments to build a mid-sized banking empire. This, and his political ties, is what led to his appointment to senior positions in the Bank of England’s Australia Office in Canberra[1] in 1941. Using his political and economic position, he, along with Kung after 1939, was able to start exercising a great deal of political influence within Australian politics. The greatest example of this was when he was able to secure Liren Sun’s commission into the Australian Defence Force.
Liren Sun, “Australasia’s Rommel,” was born to an unremarkable family in an unremarkable village in Anhwei Province. He would rise to become one of the most remarkable officers in Australasian history, and one of the most remarkable military figures of Chinese birth.
In 1923, he moved to the United States to attend his senior year at Purdue University, and received a degree in Civil Engineering before enrolling at the Virginia Military Institute in 1924, graduating in 1927. After touring Europe and Japan as a military observer and attache, he returned to China and enlisted in the National Revolutionary Army. By 1930, he was made a colonel, a meteoric rise that spoke to Sun’s military capability. However, he was in murkier waters politically. Sun was deeply mistrustful of the KMT-Left and their allies in the Communist Party of China, the Comintern and the Soviet Union. This initial mistrust soured into hatred when he learned of his beloved Virginia Military Academy being overrun by the Revolutionary Army during Red May - many of his friends amongst the faculty had declared for MacArthur and perished defending the school against Navy mutineers. This was further exacerbated when the new UASR began furnishing the KMT with aid in what he saw as an attempt to buy the Wuhan Government out from its people.
However, despite shared political sympathies, Sun despised Jiang even more than the leftists. The actual reason for this mutual dislike is largely unknown. Most historians believe that it is likely due to Sun’s links to America and thus perceived “foreignness,” as well as his meteoric rise, which Jiang might have perceived as a threat. Sun also likely resented Jiang’s somewhat dictatorial control over Whampoa and what he saw as missteps in the curriculum. Sun was also staunchly opposed to the Japanese and their puppet warlords, despite their shared anti-communism. Whatever their reasons, there was not much love lost between the two, so Sun was shunted off to politically unimportant attache roles, and was not brought into Jiang’s conspiracy against the Wuhan Government.
This was why Sun was abroad, working with ANZPAC in Manila when he learned of Wang Jingwei’s ultimatum to the Japanese and the war’s escalation into an all-consuming conflict that led to the fall of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan. As part of the last dregs of HH Kung’s “hedging” program, the NRA had been continuing a pre-Red May exchange program with the Commonwealth. In this capacity, Sun had been seconded as an observer for the annual ANZPAC wargames in the jungles of Luzon. It was during these wargames when the young Colonel heard of his homeland falling into open war between what he considered to be two unacceptable governments. To Sun, both were backed by foreign powers with nothing like China’s best interests at heart. The China that he knew and loved, it seemed, was already lost. That is, except for the diasporal lifeboat of refugees, supported by an exile splinter of the KMT that had lodged in Australasia and nurtured by TV Soong.
After extensive talks with ANZPAC HQ and a series of letters and telegrams between Singapore, Manila, Sydney, and Canberra, Sun came to a decision; he would leave the NRA behind - Jiang’s and the Left’s - and sign up with the Australian Defence Forces. The expanding military was in desperate need of field officers, and Sun was more than qualified. Sun accepted a commission as a brigadier in the Australian Defence Force in September of 1939, and moved to Sydney early the next year. This decision would take him to a brigade command in the 3rd Australasian Division “Meat Grinder,” and as far afield as Malaya, Iran, the Levant, and eventually to Rome.
All three, by and large, represented the trend of the politically active Chinese who had emigrated to Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s: former KMT members or sympathisers who were firmly part of the party’s anti-communist Right, while not having much love lost for either Japan’s puppet warlords or Jiang Jieshi, politically or personally. This “centrist” segment of ex-KMT cadres would form the core of the grassroots support for what would be known as the “Kung-Soong Network”.
The Network, which was started by TV Soong and was supercharged by HH Kung’s political and monetary capital in 1939, would quickly make its imprint on the fabric of life across Australasia. Kung had made a name for himself in governing China, and quickly became a notable in Sydney, Canberra, and Wellington society and politics. Kung and Soong had initially discussed the possibility of creating a KMT-in-exile and a “Third Government” for the Republic of China in Australia but this was ultimately scrapped due to most of the potential membership in the Chinese community in Australia and New Zealand intending to remain as immigrants. The final nail in the proposal’s coffin came in 1942 with the entry of the Commonwealth into the war against Japan. Being co-belligerents with the Wuhan Government made hosting, let alone recognizing, a pretender government politically infeasible for the Commonwealth.
Without that possibility, the Kung-Soong Network concentrated into building a powerful political lobbying organisation to represent the interests of the rapidly growing East Asian community in Australia and New Zealand. This political machinery was put into great use by furnishing Kung and Soong’s political allies with donations and personnel. The Network would be brought to bear against racist local officials and business owners, communist agitators, anti-war activists, and anyone else Kung and Soong saw as enemies or even potential enemies. After arriving in Sydney in 1940, Brigadier Liren Sun would become the Network’s man in the military, lending them credence when lobbying on military issues. The activities of dignitaries like Kung, Soong, and Sun would spread the influence of Tridemism [2] within the halls of Australian and New Zealander power, and it was the Kung-Soong Network that would form the core of the National Solidarity Party after the war and unification.
When the war came to the southwest Pacific in 1942, it was not this war that was expected. Rather than a war against Communist America, the enemy was Concordist Japan. In Insulindia and Mindanao, the Japanese exploited their agreements with the Dutch and the British to foster fifth columns, enabling a lightning campaign across the region when the war began. Manila fell within days of Japanese landings due to KALIBAPI uprisings. The Dutch were expelled from their holdings and were replaced by local collaborators in a single day in a breathtaking coup. However, the most fighting that the Japanese saw in those first few months was not in these campaigns but in Malaya and in Indochina, with Malaya considered to be the most strategically important. Yasuhito knew that taking or isolating Singapore and thus securing the Straits of Malacca would effectively shut the Entente out of the theatre, giving the Japanese a free hand to consolidate their new holdings and press the advantage. The task of making this a reality was given to Yamashita Tomoyuki and the 25th Army.
After landing at ports on the Thai side of the border, and establishing beachheads at Alor Setar and Kota Bharu, the 25th Army began its march down the Malayan Peninsula and towards Singapore. Facing them was the 11th Indian Division, the 51st British Infantry Brigade, and three divisions of the I Australasian Army Corps. While the Commonwealth Forces were, on paper, numerically superior, they had a few disadvantages. While the troops stationed in Malaya had trained for jungle fighting, their training had been a rough coverage of the basics. The Japanese had been extensively drilled on Formosa since 1941, creating probably the best jungle fighters on Earth. Additionally, the three divisions of the 25th Army had been in China until they began their jungle training, creating a core of hardened veterans compared to the relatively green Commonwealth troops. This, combined with the use of bicycles to increase march speeds, allowed for the Japanese to punch well above their weight in the Malayan Campaign. Finally, Pacific GHQ found itself far from the top of the Imperial General Staff’s priority list after 1940, as the Imperial General Staff began to prepare to fight a war in Europe. As such, the local air forces were considerably depleted and out of date, and while the Japanese only had enough tanks in Malaya to form a single brigade, the Commonwealth had none. This resulted in the Japanese attaining air superiority within the first two weeks of the campaign. Within a month, the bulk of I AAC had been isolated in Malacca as the Japanese corralled the rest of the Commonwealth forces into Singapore and began to set up siege works. While two of I AAC’s divisions managed to evacuate back to Australia and be replaced by fresh Indian troops - thanks to a bloody but successful days-long rearguard action on the part of the 3rd Australasian Division. Outside of Malacca, the Commonwealth forces in Malaya were dead, captured, or isolated in Singapore. Only the destruction of the bridges and some ingenious fortification of the city prevented it from falling. The most notable of this was the concreting of the battlecruiser HMS Repulse into HMNB Singapore’s dry dock - where she remains to this day - to act as an impromptu bunker and shore battery. Despite years of brutal siege, Singapore remained steadfast throughout the war.
The military disasters that befell the Commonwealth in 1942 made the existing theatre command system untenable. Singapore, and GHQ Pacific, was cut off from in-theatre Commonwealth forces by IJA siegeworks and an IJN blockade. The Philippines and most of the rest of the new Entente’s Pacific holdings were now in the hands of Concordist Japan and its client regimes. ANZPAC had been effectively made ineffective within a few months of fighting. As such, a total reorganisation of the command structure was undertaken by the New Zealand and Australian governments, with London’s approval. Australian, New Zealand, and the few remaining Indian, British, and Philippine army units in the theatre would be placed under Australia-New Zealand Army Command, with General Sir Thomas Blamey as CinC. Taking its name from the old colloquial term for the Australasian Army Corps of the last war, ANZAC would be a joint command with responsibility shared between the two sister Dominion governments and the Philippine Government-in-Exile. While naval operations remained in the hands of the Entente Admiralty, all Commonwealth land forces in the Southwest Pacific would fall under ANZAC’s operational purview. Along with the Australasian General Staff Committee and the Joint War Production Committee, it would be among the first true shared organisations between the two nations, and would form the genesis of the modern Australasian Defence Forces. Most notably, and unlike Pacific GHQ, ANZAC was, by and large, led and staffed by Australians and New Zealanders. While British officers held positions in ANZAC’s staff (and the Entente representative to the AGSC was its Chairman), it was clear that London was placing the war in the southwest Pacific in the hands of its farthest flung Dominions.
The tenacity, skill, and zeal of ANZAC, and the soldiers of the Australian and New Zealand Defence Forces, during both the First and Second World Wars, has been colloquially referred to as the “Anzac Spirit.” Both Australia and New Zealand would quietly take pride in this to this day, and it serves as the bedrock of Australasian national identity. Even to this day, the men and women of the Australasian Defense Forces are unofficially known as “the Anzacs”.
On the homefront, the declaration of war was neither unwelcome nor unexpected. Australia and New Zealand were quick to begin full-scale mobilisation efforts; with factories in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, as well as new factories in Newcastle, Geelong, and other countless new hives of industry burning bright with the smelting and assembly of weapons, tanks and other equipment, and their armies received many new volunteers at recruitment offices. On the other hand, the declaration of the Franco-British Union on the 1st of March brought a question to the forefront of the minds of people and politicians alike on both sides of the Tasman: what should the pace of unification be? The 1938 Treaty of Wellington had already made Australasian unification an inevitability, but it had been four years since its ratification, with the pace of integration becoming excruciatingly slow. The realities of the Commonwealth entering a second global war in thirty years likely meant that the timeline for unification would slow down even further. Further discussions of the topic, however, would be quietly shelved for the foreseeable future so the war effort could be focused on.
While opinion in Canberra and Wellington was mixed - many wanted to contribute to as many fronts as possible to show their countries’ dedication to the new Entente and the Commonwealth - the leadership of both Dominions and the Entente Chiefs of Staff Committee saw the Empire of Japan and its new client states as the greater threat and best use for the troops at ANZAC’s disposal. The exception was a single token division: the 3rd Australasian Division “Meatgrinder ” - having earned a divisional sobriquet in Malaya - left Australia for West Asia and the fighting in the Levant in October 1942. With them was Brigadier Liren Sun and his 2nd Brigade, consisting mostly of Chinese and Daehanese immigrant volunteers from the cities of Australia, eager to show their loyalty to their new homes. They would not return for nearly three years, when the war had taken them all the way to Rome.
While the Pacific Dominions spent the first year of the war on the defensive, they would begin counter-offensives in early 1943. They would begin pushing into the Co-Prosperity Sphere at New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and eventually throughout insular Southeast Asia, with help from Royal Navy ships from across the Commonwealth and American Red Navy submariners. The Pacific War had begun, and it would not end until either the Co-Prosperity Sphere or the United Nations saw the other broken and defeated.
[1] With the monetary policy of the Dominions remaining with London after TTL’s Balmoral Declaration, it follows that the Bank of England would maintain local offices in the Dominions to coordinate policy.
[2] Referring to the ideology based on Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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