Procure An Awkward Truth: The Bombing Of Darwin, February 1942 Prepared By Peter Grose Distributed As Publication

read my full review sitelinkclick here
No Spoilers
Despite the fact that this is a nonfiction, historical documentary style book, Peter Grose does a steraling job of keeping it interesting and avoids the usual dryness one gets in these books.
It is written in such a way that the reader feels compelled to keep turning the pages and before no time will find themselves at the end and far richer for it.
A longer discussion is posted on my website jjsheahan, com

Peter Grose had previously written about the effect of the midget submarine attack on Sydney in Mayin A Very Rude Awakening, so he is developing a bit of a theme with this one in looking behind the official story of our military history.
I havent read the earlier book yet, but based on this one, I will seek it out,

In his preface to this book, Grose challenges the idea that the bombing of Darwin was a national shame by ennumerating the steady and heroic actions performed by many in response to the onslaught.
I tend to agree with another reviewer that Grose does not carry this notion through the book with conviction,

Grose recreates the events of the first raids from primary sources, memoirs, personal observations, and the independent report commissioned by Curtins government to, The sequence is easy to follow I have to withhold judgement as to the accuracy of his pictorial because I know so little, but his approach seems solid without being overly objective.


Until I read this book, I thought the bombing of Darwin was synonymous with official coverup, I was interested to find out more about what actually did happen up there inand what the extent of the coverup was, What I found was that the initial raids were massive with a death toll of over, that the raids went on until November, that there was a mass exodus from the city after the first raid, and that the diminution of the facts was a complex process.


In Groses account, the flight of Darwins citizenry to Adelaide River known colloquially as the Adelaide River Stakes and the extent of the looting in their absence stemmed mainly from the lack of leadership following the attack and the lack of preparedness in the face of the certainty of an attack, both systemic failures.
The title might refer to the possible incompetence of the higher echelons in the Armed Forces, It might also refer to the myopic, national fixation on our membership in the British Empire until the time Menzies was relieved of government and replaced with Labors Curtin administration.


The title may also refer to the reasoning put forward by the military to Curtin that the extent of the disaster at Darwin be concealed: that it would damage morale with unknown but unpalatable implications for the war effort.


Patriotism would have us believe that we are special, different to them, Better. Curtin wanted to make the facts known, once he knew them, but was convinced by other voices that the risk was too great, that the public could not be trusted to handle the news of such a disaster in a mature manner.
It had been a bad week: Singapore fell onth February, Curtin exhausted himself battling to bring Aussie divisions home and ended up in hospital onth, then the first bombing on theth.
With the Pacific War in its infancy and going so badly for us, the government of the day must have been scrambling to use anything it could to shore up national resolve and bury anything that would undermine it.

Excellent read

Not enough Australians understand or appreciate the complexities of Darwins existence, This book is extremely well written and teases apart a complex event with clarity and empathy, An outstanding read. The bombing of Darwin on February,is the battle Australia tries to forget, Although there was much to be proud of that daycourage, determination, and improvisationthe dark side of the story lingers: looting, desertion, and a calamitous failure of Australian leadership.
The Japanese struck with the same carrierborne force that devastated Pearl Harbor onlyweeks earlier, There was a difference: they dropped more bombs on Darwin, killed more civilians, and sank more ships than in Pearl Harbor, It remains the single deadliest event in Australian history, Absorbing, spirited, and fastpaced, this is a story of the day war first came to Australia, and of the soldiers and civilians who faced their toughest test on home soil.
When I went to Canberra recently, and knew I would have a few hours of waiting, I absentmindedly left my current book sitting on the table at home.
It was afterpm in Canberra, so of course my options for purchasing a book were limited, I found that Target at Belconnen was still open, and I thought that, worse case, this book might provide me with some historical knowledge, It did. But I must say that as I was reading, I found Grose's tone to be rather grating probably like mine when I get on my highhorse about Australia and Australians.
Grose doesn't pretend that he likes Administrator Abbott the Northern Territory's headhoncho in the 's and 's, Indeed, he states that he finds it hard to like him, Grose, too, makes an inadvertent claim that "Canberra" did this and that in the earlys when appointing a man to run the Territory, Of course, "Canberra" was not the centre of the federal government untilit was run from Melbourne, I am sure that Grose knows this, but the anachronism grated, And having previously lived in Canberra for nearon twenty years, the use of the city's name to represent all that is bad in our political system still annoys me no end.
As the book develops, Grose indicates that he was writing as a counter to Paul Hasluck's history, Hasluck saw the reaction of the people of Darwin to be a case of national shame, Grose brought me back to the fold when he mentions the popular Australian dislike of "reffos" refugees and the way "these people" behave, Grose tells us that when Australians, following the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in 'became "reffos", they behaved like every other group of refugees.
The book was not everything I expected, and upon completion, I was pleased that it was not a "white" armbanding of the omnipotence of ordinary Australians who, unlike the rest of the people of the world, are somehow superior because they just are, and Grose was at pains to make this clear that he was not of that brigade.
For this I was truly grateful, There are numerous historical facts and corrections to the record, and I have a much better historical understanding of what happened in the first attack on Australian soil since.
But I didn't like Grose's tone, especially where he puts his personality into his work, This is remarkable in that I do the same thing, yet here I am reacting as others do to my own work, Surely there is a lesson for me in the reading of this book, It is unfair to lump all of this on Grose, and given my lack of knowledge on the historical subject, I am hardly one to judge.
Yet the lesson I have learnt from this book is very powerful, even though I lament readers' aversion to any form of personality in one's writing that does not display enthusiasm for a cause one way or another.
As La Rochefoucauld wrote in: "Enthusiasm is the only convincing orator it is like the infallible rule of some function of Nature, An enthusiastic simpleton is more convincing than a silvertongued orator", I suppose had I liked this book more, I would have respected Grose less, Peter Grose has done a very good job in researching and bringing together, in a coherent and entertaining way, various accounts, many unreliable and selfserving of the bombing of Darwin by a large Japanese air armada onFebruary.


It is a sad tale, not only of destruction and considerable loss of life, but also of unpreparedness, incompetence and a stunning lack of leadership at many levels.
However, there are certainly stories of individual heroism and determination, especially by the antiaircraft gunnery crews,

It remains a national shame that this event, and the subsequentJapanese air attacks on Darwin, and a total ofraids across northern Australia, is not better known by Australians.
It was, in many respects, a bigger event than Pearl Harbor, It really should be given more prominence in the school history curriculum,

However, for me it was also a personal family story, Among the civilians killed in the initial raid were the Post Master, his wife andyear old daughter, They were my father's uncle, aunt mother's sister and cousin, They were obliterated when the Post Office and the slit trench in which they were taking refuge took a direct hit from akilogram bomb, At some points, I found the book a little hard to read but that may be due to the fact that I don't often read the military history books.
It was very informative and as I am living in Darwin it was great to know the places

they are talking about,

I selected this for a Reading Challenge as a book that takes place in my hometown Guess where I went on holiday in June.
And while I was driving around I noticed how omnipresent WWwas up there, Air strips everywhere. After reading this Terrific book I now understand, I had no idea how serious the war was up here, The same force that attacked Pearl Harbor attacked Darwin only with more planes and bigger bombs, The casualty rate was only smaller because there were fewer ships and people to destroy, The book evokes the terror of the first bombing, I would have run for the hills too, And the fact that Darwin was bombedtimes during the war! I had no idea! Typically for an Australian, I know more about the English Civil war and War of Independence than I do about my own country's history.
Grose shows how the war in Darwin was downplayed because the place was so undermanned and poorly administered, Administrator Abbott! What a piece of work! Which is a pity because people were very brave in the battle, I read about the bombing with deep feelings of dread at how vulnerable Darwin was and how much worse it could have been had the Japanese decided to invade.
Though perhaps the dead red center would have protected us even though we are only it's adopted children, Which leads to my only and probably unfair criticism of the book, Where were the indigenous and nowhite populations in all this But perhaps there weren't any records, A great read anyway!.