However,when the Japanese Navy requested troops for an invasion of Australia at ameeting of the Army and Navy Sections of Japan's Imperial General Headquarters on 4 March 1942, the generals refused. They had a different butequally sinister plan for bringing Australia under Japanese control. TheJapanese generals did not see a need to commit massive troop and logisticalresources to the conquest of the Australian mainland in the early months of1942. The easy capture of Rabaul on 23 January 1942 and the first bombings ofDarwin on 19 February 1942 had convinced the Japanese Army that Australia hadlittle with which to defend itself from invasion. It was the sheer size ofAustralia that the generals saw as an immediate problem. The generals feltthat their army resources had already been heavily overextended by Japan'srapid and massive territorial conquests, and that the Imperial Armyneeded time to consolidate its territorial gains.The Japanese Army wasconfident that Australia could be pressured into surrender to Japan byisolating it completely from the United States as part of an intensifiedblockade, and by applying intense psychological pressure. TheJapanese plan to sever Australia's lifeline to the United States was given thecode reference "OperationFS" (also known as "FS Operation").
By7 March 1942, the Japanese Navy and Army had agreed that severing Australia'slifeline to the United States (Operation FS) and pressuring Australia intosubmission to Japan were more important objectives than the limitedinvasion of Australia's northern coast that the Navy had earlier proposed. At theImperial General Headquarters Liaison Conference on 7 March 1942, the NavyGeneral Staff and Navy Ministry agreed to their limited invasion proposal beingdeferred in favour of the Army plan to sever Australia's lifeline to the UnitedStates and then pressure Australia's into total surrender to Japan.Planning foran invasion of the Australian mainland was not dropped at this LiaisonConference. It was agreed that planning for invasion of the Australian mainlandwould be referred back to Navy and Army headquarters for further study. It isimportant to note that the Japanese generals did not rule out their support foran invasion by force if Australia did not surrender as they expected when theJapanese noose was tightened.
Inpublic addresses to the Diet (Japanese parliament) on 21 January 1942, and onthe occasion of the fall of Singapore (15 February 1942), Japan's PrimeMinister, General Hideki Tojo, called on Australia to surrender to Japan.General Tojo suggested that Japan would be merciful to Australia if thishappened. Tojo would repeat this demand for Australia's surrender in theJapanese parliament on 28 May 1942. To distract attention from the impendingJapanese attack on America's Midway Atoll in the central Pacific, and perhapsto demonstrate Australia's vulnerability, Japanese midget submarines penetratedSydney Harbour on 31 May 1942 and torpedoed the Royal Australian Navy depotship Kuttabul, killing twenty-one sailors. In Australia,Tojo's demands for surrender fell on deaf ears. The treacherous Japanesesneak attack on the American Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor whileJapanese diplomats were still discussing peace in Washington was unlikely toproduce trust by Australia in Japanese assurances!
So prior to the end of the war in 1945 there was no guarantee that the Japanese would not reconsider an invasion of Australia?
They certainly would have, had not the Australian’s and American’s defeated them in the Coral and Bismark seas.
