the330thbg wrote:She: "Is that true? I thought USA is the friendliest country in the world!"
This episode may illustrate the state of education in Japan.
I think that's funnier than you may realise...
p51 wrote:People today can’t understand how terrified the Australians must have been of an invasion. Just like invading the US, it was never really something that would have happened, but there was no way for the Allies to have known that at the time.
It's an interesting comparison. It's pretty certain the Japanese never had plans to invade Australia for real, but they were a lot closer to mainland Australia than they ever got to the lower 48, and the attacks on the North of Australia were real and were on the mainland of the country. There were misleading 'clues' to Japans intent to invade Australia, such as occupation money printed, and maps and contingency plans, but they have less hysteric explanations.
However those attacks would equate to Canadians getting bombed on Ellesmere Island, or some of the more remote parts of Alaska for Americans, as most Australians are in the lower south-east crescent of the country between Brisbane and Adelaide. The attack on Sydney was a real strike at the heart of Australia's war machine, but a tiny one.
At the time the attacks on Darwin (Australia's most battered city!) were horrific for the people there, essentially a defenceless city (as they were in Broome) but the Darwin attacks were censored at the time, which is another reason why even today some Australians otherwise well educated don't know about them as much as irrelevances like Gallipoli where we are
still getting echoes of the jingoist propaganda of
that time.
Of course the civil and military directors of the US and Australia in W.W.II both wanted to ensure genuine fear of invasion by the enemy to keep people's eye on the ball (both countries were comparatively complacent about the risk of foreign attack) - a legitimate enough need, albeit one that's led to some pretty silly beliefs strongly held to this day based on the W.W.II era internal propaganda.
Steve Nelson wrote:I managed to sit through "Australia." ... I found it a rather forgettable film.)
Not surprising - it was basically a tourism advert pretending to be a history costume drama. Such guaranteed anodyne pap-for-the-masses comes stamped 'Avoid', IMHO.

Regards,