Kevin: Note before we start. It should come as no surprise that I pay attention to the analytics for this show, and I've noticed that I have a growing listener base in Australia. Honestly, it's surprising, but it's great to see the show reach that far from home. So Australia, this episode is for you. It's the first one set in your part of the world, and I put a lot of research into getting the history right. I hope you enjoy it. February. nineteen forty two, Melbourne, Australia. A second floor office at Victoria Barracks, the Army's wartime headquarters. It's close to midnight and the Prime Minister of Australia is reading a cable telling him London has already decided for him. John Curtin is 57 and he's held the job for four months. Seven days ago, Singapore surrendered to the Japanese and 15,000 Australian soldiers were marched into prison camps. Three days ago, Japanese bombers hit Darwin on Australia's own northern coast. The army that should be defending the country is at sea in the middle of the Indian Ocean coming home from the war against Hitler in Europe. The cable is from Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain. It says the ships carrying the 7th Australian Division have been turned around on Churchill's order without asking curtain and are now steaming toward Burma. It also says some of those ships no longer have the fuel to reach Australia, that the President of the United States agrees with Churchill, and that Churchill himself, quote, could not contemplate an Australian refusal. So Curtin refuses. The convoy turns south, the men come home, and modern Australia dates from that answer. But what if he says yes? What if the man four months into the job Does what every Australian Prime Minister before it had always done. It hands the empire its soldiers. Let's hit Control Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision where we hit Control Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. Australia entered the Second World War with almost no ability to defend its own territory, but the weakness was deliberate. Australian governments between the wars bought their security from Britain under an arrangement called the Singapore Strategy. Basically, what that is is that Britain built a base on Singapore, on the southern tip of Malaya. And the idea was that if Japan ever moved south, the Royal Navy would steam east and fight the war there. Almost 4,000 miles from Sydney. In exchange, Australia sent its soldiers wherever the Empire needed them. So, in nineteen thirty nine, Australia raised a volunteer army for service overseas, called the Second Australian Imperial Force, and shipped it to the other side of the world. The 6th, 7th, and 9th Divisions went to North Africa in the Middle East to fight Germany and Italy. The 8th went to Malaya and Singapore. Home defense fell to the responsibility of the militia, which were part-time conscripts the law barred from serving outside Australian territory. By nineteen forty two, the militia had about two hundred and sixty two thousand men, but they were badly equipped and barely trained. John Curtin took office on October seventh, nineteen forty one, when the previous government collapsed on a budget vote. He led a labor minority government that survived on the votes of two independents. During the First World War, he had been one of the loudest voices in the country against conscription. He had been prime minister for sixty-two days when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on december eighth, nineteen forty one, Australian time. Australia declared war on Japan that day on its own authority without waiting for London for the first time in its history. Then Japan destroyed the plan in three days. On december tenth, nineteen forty one, Japanese aircraft found the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off the Malayan coast and sank them both in a single afternoon. Those two ships were the force the whole Singapore strategy depended on. The base still stood, but the fleet was at the bottom of the South China Sea. On December 27, Curtin published a New Year message in the Melbourne Herald under the headline The Task Ahead. And there's one sentence that made it famous. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom. Needless to say, Churchill was furious. President Franklin Roosevelt read it as panic. Both men had already agreed in secret at a conference in Washington that same month that the strategy was beat Germany first and fight a holding war against Japan. London didn't tell Australia any of this. Singapore surrendered on February 15, 1942. About 130,000 Allied troops went into Japanese captivity, and roughly 15,000 of them were Australians from the 8th Division. Churchill called it the worst disaster in British history. Ten weeks into the Pacific War, the base at the center of Twenty years of defense planning was already in Japanese hands. An entire Australian division had been marched into prison camps. The promise that the country had organized itself around had failed. That left Australia two trained divisions, the sixth and the seventh. Both were at sea in the Indian Ocean, on British and American transports, coming home from the farther side of the planet. Australia needed those soldiers more than any point in its history. But London controlled the ships they were standing on. The request landed two days after Singapore fell. On february seventeenth, nineteen forty two, the Pacific War Council met in London, and Australia's representative, former Prime Minister Earl Page, cabled home its proposal. London wanted Australia to agree that quote, the seventh Australian division already on the water should go to the most urgent spot at the moment, which is Burma. The case for Burma, then a British colony between India and Thailand was Rested on one road. Rangoon, the capital, sat at the southern end of the Burma Road, and this is the last overland supply route into China. If the Japanese took Rangoon, they sealed China off from the rest of the world. Burma also covered the eastern approach to India. General Archibald Wavell, the Allied commander in the region, had just written off Java, the convoy's original destination. He told Churchill the island couldn't be held. Curtin's war cabinet answered on February 18th. Government has decided that it cannot agree to the proposal that the 7th AIF Division should be diverted to Burma. The men were coming home. On February 19th, Japanese carrier aircraft hit Darwin in the heaviest attack ever made on Australian soil. At least 243 people died. The planes flew from the same carriers that had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier. Churchill answered the refusal on february twentieth with a cable aimed straight at Curtin. I suppose you realize that your leading division, the head of which is sailing south of Colombo, is the only force that can reach Rangoon in time to prevent its loss and the severance of communication with China. Colombo is in Ceylon, the island we now call Sri Lanka. Churchill's argument was geography. The ships were closer to Burma than they were to home. The War Cabinet refused a second time, and then a third. So Churchill stopped asking without telling the Australian government he ordered the convoy north toward Rango. His cable from February 22nd, 1942, told Curtin what he had done. We could not contemplate that you would refuse our request and that of the President of the United States for the diversion of the leading division to save the situation in Burma. The convoy is now too far north for some of the ships in it to reach Australia without refueling. Roosevelt applied his own pressure separately. Churchill moved the convoy first, informed Melbourne second, and then argued that the ships could no longer turn back anyway. The ships were already pointed at Burma. So refusal meant forcing a reversal in mid-ocean. Now, the fuel claim was unverifiable for Melport, and it came from the man who controlled the tankers. Roosevelt, the ally Curtin had staked the country's future on eight weeks earlier, was asking too. The strategic case was real. Losing Rangoon severed China. Curtin had held office for four months, led a minority. And headed a party that split in half over conscription in 1916. Every Australian Prime Minister before him had just given London what it asked for. The decisive news had reached neither government yet, but the fact was Burma was already lost. While the cables crossed the Indian Ocean, the campaign they argued over collapsed. Britain had exactly one division defending Burma, the 17th Indian. On February 22nd and 23rd, the Japanese destroyed it at the Satang River, the last natural barrier before Rango. The British commander, Major General John Smith, blew the only bridge at 5 30 in the morning with two-thirds of his own men still on the enemy bank. Most of the division's weapons and vehicles stayed there with them. Weivel himself later wrote that the Satang fight really sealed the fate of Rangu. The disaster ran across the same two days Churchill spent cabling Melbourne that the Australians could still save the city. He was recruiting reinforcements for a battle the Japanese had already won. Now in real history, Curtin held. His reply of february twenty third restated that the country's outer defenses had vanished and that Churchill had treated Australian approval as a formality. It closed with the news that Roosevelt earned fully understands and appreciates the reasons for our decision. Churchill gave way the same day. The convoy refueled at Colombo and sailed on to Adelaide. The seventh Division walked down the gangways in the middle of March. Now in the Control Z timeline, it's close to midnight on february twenty second, and Curtin reads the fuel paragraph one final time, but this time he believes it. He's defied Churchill three times in five days. Refusing Roosevelt in the same week risks the American relationship itself, and the cable in his hand says the ships can no longer come home regardless. At one in the morning, he drafts the answer himself. Australia consents to the diversion of the leading division to Rango on the understanding that the whole force returns the moment the situation allows. So the seventh division. Sails north. The leading brigade group of the 7th Division, about 5,000 men under Major General Arthur Tubby Allen, comes ashore at the Rangoon docks in the first days of March 1942. The city has been under Japanese air attack since Christmas. The warehouses along the river are burning, and oil smoke hangs over the wharves. Allen is a Sydney accountant in civilian life and one of the most experienced soldiers Australia has. He commanded a thousand men in battle at age twenty three on the Western Front, and he led this division through Syria in nineteen forty one. His men land with rifles, machine guns, and the ammunition they carry off the ships themselves, because everything else is behind them on the Indian Ocean. The January loading plan aimed the convoys at Java and spread the division's trucks, artillery, and radio equipment across five separate sailings. On february nineteenth, a detachment from the Fastliner Orcades went ashore on Java with its vehicles and heavy weapons still stowed in other hulls. The men fought with what they carried until the island fell on March ninth, and then they surrendered. More than twenty seven hundred Australians went into captivity there. Allen's brigade lands at Rangoon in exactly the same condition. General Harold Alexander took command of the defense on march fifth. And decided the next day to abandon Rangoon, so Allen lands into a retreat. His brigade joins the column of British, Indian, and Burmese troops moving north out of the city, alongside the one hundred and fifteen American built light tanks of the seventh Armored Brigade. On March seventh, the escape nearly ends at Taoqian, a road junction twenty miles north. A Japanese regiment under Colonel Takenobu Sakuma, had blocked the only road out, trapping the entire army, headquarters, tanks, Australians, everything. British tanks and infantry attack the block all day, but Sakuma's men hold. Then Sakuma follows his written orders, which tell him to screen the main advance rather than hold ground. He pulls his men off the road in the dark. At first light, the next day on March eighth, the column finds the way open and pours through. Japanese troops walk into Rangoon at midday and find the port completely empty. Then Allen's men walk to India. The retreat runs 900 miles and lasts all the way into May, north past Prome and the oil fields of Irrawaddy Valley, across the Chingwin River, and up into the mountains on the Indian frontier. The brigade has no transport, so the wounded ride Whatever carts the column can commandeer. Malaria and dysentery kill more men than the Japanese do. Half a million civilian refugees share the same tracks, walking out of Burma ahead of the occupation, and tens of thousands of them die on the way. The monsoon breaks over the border hills in the third week of may nineteen forty two, just as the last Australians cross into India at Imphal. Alan walks out with about 3,100 of the 5,000 men he brought ashore. The rest are dead, missing, or now prisoners of Japan. The Burma Army loses roughly 13,000 of its 42,000 men and saves only 28 of its 150 guns. The British destroy 69 of their last 70 tanks on the bank of the Chinwak because no crossing can take them. It's the longest retreat in the history of the British Army, and the Australians make it the whole way on foot. When Rangoon falls, Wavell diverts the other four convoys into Colombo, Bombay, and Calcutta, and there they stay. India now faces a Japanese army on its border. The twelve thousand trained Australian infantrymen in Wavell's ports become first a reserve against invasion, and then the garrison of Salem. Curtin cables London for their return throughout the rest of 1942, and Churchill answers every request with sympathy, but then delay. His position rests on a document with Curtin's signature attached to it. Australia consented to the diversion on February 22nd, and the agreement said that the men would return when the situation allowed. In Churchill's judgment, however, that moment never arrives. On july twenty first, nineteen forty two, Japanese forces land at Gona and Buna on the north coast of Papua, the Australian run territory located just above Queensland. They push inland toward Port Moresby, Australia's last base north of the mainland. The route is called the Kokota Track, a foot trail over the Owen Stanley Range that climbs past seven thousand feet. The unit set to stop them is Marubra Force, the thirty ninth battalion of the militia. Boys averaging about 18 and a half years old in desert khaki, and then 300 men of the Papuan Infantry Battalion. Kokota Village and its airfield fall on July 29th. At the end of August, the 39th makes its stand at Isuraba, high on the track. Its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Honor, holds his exhausted battalion together through two days of close fighting before falling back down the trail. The reinforcements climbing up behind him are Americans. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding the Allied Theater since March, sends the closest trained infantry he has, the one hundred twenty sixth Infantry Regiment of the thirty second division, National Guardsmen from Wisconsin and Michigan who landed in Australia in May. In our timeline, those guardsmen bite the Japanese for the first time at Buna in November and lose six hundred ninety men doing it. In this timeline, however, they meet them three months earlier, fighting rearguards down the mountain. The Japanese commander, Major General Tomitara Hori, takes Ioriba on september eighth and pushes onto Imita Ridge, the last high ground on the trail. From Imita, his forward patrols can see the lights of Port Moresby and the sea beyond them. Milne Bay goes even worse. It's a deep harbor of Papua's eastern tip, where American engineers have carved three airstrips out of coconut plantations. In our timeline, two brigades defend it, and the formation that breaks the Japanese landing is the 18th Brigade of the 7th Division, Tobruk Veterans under George Wooten. In this timeline, Wooten's men are garrisoning Ceylon. So the defense here is the Militia 7th Brigade, the American Engineers, and and the Kittyhawks of number seventy five and seventy six squadrons of the Royal Australian Air Force. Japanese Marines come ashore on the night of august twenty fifth with light tanks. The militiamen fight them along the shoreline for six nights. On august thirty first, the Japanese take the easternmost airstrip, and the two squadrons fly their surviving aircraft out to Port Moresby. Major General Cyril Close, commanding the garrison, pulls his troops back to the western end of the bay. He holds it, and then he cables for a brigade that is 5,000 miles away. But then, a battle 600 miles away ends the campaign. American Marines landed on Guado Canal in the Solomon Islands east of Papua on August 7th. By the middle of September, the fight for that island is consuming every ship, aircraft and battalion that the Japanese can spare. On September 18th, Tokyo orders Hori to abandon the Port Moresby operation and pull back to the beachheads at Buna and Gona. His withdrawal starts on September 24th, and his soldiers shoot their own stretcher cases because the column can't carry them. The Japanese Navy evacuates the Milne Bay landing force the same week. When Australian and American patrols push onto Amida Ridge at the end of September, they find abandoned positions and hide. Hundreds of Japanese dead. The dead had starved on less than a cup of rice-a-day rations within sight of the sea. Port Moresby stands, and the threat to the mainland passes. The force that settled both outcomes is the United States Marine Corps fighting in the Solomon. In this war, the first clear defeat of the Japanese army on land belongs to America. The version of nineteen forty two that Australians will teach their children takes only one sentence. The militia gave ground for two months and the invaders left when Tokyo ordered them. Curtin needs infantry, and by late 1942, the only source left is the militia. In November of that year, he walks into a special federal conference of the Labor Party, which he has led since 1935, and asks it to authorize compulsory service in any overseas theater. His own minister for labor, Eddie Ward, accuses him to his face of putting young men into the slaughterhouse. The delegates argue into January of nineteen forty three, and Curtin finally carries the conference by four votes. Parliament passes the Defense Act on february nineteenth, nineteen forty three, and the delegates who voted no spend the next twenty years repeating the same charge. He shipped the volunteers to a British defeat in Burma, then conscripted teenagers to replace them. The Statute of Westminster was The British law that offered its dominions full control of their own legislation has waited eleven years for the Australian Parliament to adopt it. Now in our history, Curtin adopted it in October of nineteen forty two and then backdated it to the first day of the war, essentially a lawyer's way of declaring that Australia had been sovereign all along. In this timeline, however, he declines to bring the bill forward because a prime minister who signed his army over to Churchill in February had Really has no standing to legislate independence in October. The next Prime Minister, Ben Shiffley, takes it up in 1947 and then describes it to the House as routine legal maintenance, and Australians just remember it as paperwork. Curtin wins the election of August 21st, 1943, anyways, because the opposition has completely fallen apart. Labor takes forty-one of the 74 seats in the House of Representatives, eight fewer than it won in real history. And both sides spend the campaign arguing over Burma. Robert Menzies, the former prime minister, founds a new Liberal Party in August of nineteen forty four out of the old conservative parties. Wavell releases the Ceylon garrison in the first half of nineteen forty three, once the Japanese threat to India fades, and the brigades come home through Fremantle carrying malaria. The seventh spends the rest of the year rebuilding in Queensland. MacArthur concludes from 1942 that he will build his campaigns on American formations, and he holds to it. His divisions lead every operation on the road back to the Philippines, while Australians garrison the bypassed islands behind them. Australia finishes the war, essentially, as the supply base and repair yard of the Southwest Pacific. Prime Minister Curtin suffers a major heart attack in November of nineteen forty four and dies at the lodge in Canberra on july fifth, nineteen forty five. Japan surrenders in August of the same year. His deputy Frank Ford holds the office for eight days, and Shiffley, the treasurer, wins the party ballot on july twelfth. The obituaries are kind but brief. They call in honest but overmatched, and more than one of them prints the word. Burma in the opening paragraph. Australia signs its American alliance on the same date in both timelines. On september first, nineteen fifty one, in San Francisco, External Affairs Minister Percy Spender signs ONSUS, the security treaty with the United States and New Zealand, that anchors Australian defense to this day. Washington offers it as the price of Australian consent to a soft peace treaty with Japan. Spender wins the negotiation with a single argument. Britain proved at Singapore that it could no longer defend the region. Singapore fell a week before the Cable War started, and the treaty followed from that collapse with or without Curtins. Spender negotiates as the envoy of a dependable auxiliary. ⁓ Australia commits troops to Korea in nineteen fifty ahead of Britain and advisors to Vietnam in nineteen sixty two at the first American request. Inside the alliance, the country repeats its imperial habit for the next seventy years and takes the assignments that Washington hands it. Britain stays close because the February crisis ended in Australian consent in this timeline. The imperial connection holds through the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties. Britain joins the European economic community in nineteen seventy three and withdraws the trade preferences Australian exporters had depended on. The withdrawal hits a country still selling to the old market, so Australia reorients its trade toward Asia a decade later than it did in reality. Kokoda enters the school curriculum as a two month militia defeat, and Australians keep their story of soldiering in the first world war. At Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Australians who decide to make battlefield pilgrimages fly to Villers Bretonair in France, and jungle regrows over the Kokoda track. The textbooks give Curtin a paragraph as a decent administrator who simply worked himself to death. Shiffley, with the bank nationalization fight and the light on the hill, his phrase for Labour's purpose, becomes the leader the party honors the most. The Republic movement, the push to replace the British monarch with an Australian head of state, builds its argument on constitutional logic and loses the 1999 referendum by 20 points. Republicans in our history point to the week a labor prime minister refused a direct order from London and won. Republicans in this history have February 1942, and it's really just a story about consent. Australia signs AUKUS, the submarine and technology pact with Britain and the United States in September of 2021. Commentators in Canberra treat British membership as ordinary, because in this Australia, London stayed the whole time. The real decision, the one that actually happened, was to refuse. Churchill had already turned the ships and claimed some could no longer reach Australia. Roosevelt backed him. No Australian government in the four decades since Federation had ever refused London on the question of where its soldiers would fight. But Curtin said no four times in six days, and he sent the last refusal to the After Churchill informed him that the matter was settled, Australia practiced independence eight months before writing it into law. The practice began in the last week of February 1942, and every later assertion of independence repeated it. Curtin adopted the Statute of Westminster that October. In 1951, Menzies and Spender signed ONZUS, even though Britain objected to its own exclusion. Kokoda entered the national story as the ground where Australians defended their own country, and thousands of people still walk that track every year. The Republic campaign of the 1990s put that week at the center of its case. Whether that campaign was right or wrong, its argument exists because Curtin refused. The refusal didn't purchase the American Alliance. The Fall of Singapore purchased it, and Spender signed the same treaty in 1951 in both timelines. The decision fixed who would set the terms of Australia's defense, and the alternate timeline shows the other version. A safe, prosperous, but secondary country that lets its partners choose its wars for 70 years. It's close to midnight on February 22nd, 1942, and Curtin sits at his desk at Victoria Barracks. The most powerful empire in history and the strongest economy on earth have both told him his answer is wrong. He picks up a pen and writes the final no. And Australians have been living in the country he created ever since. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find it and allows me to understand whether they actually enjoy it. And if you know someone who'd enjoyed this episode, please send it to them. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perozalan. Thanks for hitting Control Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, edited, researched, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you have a coin flip decision from history you'd like to see reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube at CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave a comment. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.