VP Day generation’s spirit burns bright after 75 years

On this day 75 years ago, the Pacific War ended with the surrender of Japan. Grainy images of Australians celebrating in the streets convey the nation’s infectious relief and joy. It had been a desperate struggle, with Diggers fighting and dying in far-flung theatres of war around the globe. As in World War I, we demonstrated through substantial sacrifice that we were willing to defend our way of life. Despite suffering fewer battle deaths in World War II, the impact on Australia was more enduring than our baptism of fire in the Great War. It reached our homeland. Japanese air raids in 1942 and 1943 struck numerous towns including Darwin, Broome and Katherine. Japanese submarines even penetrated Sydney Harbour and sank a ship moored there. It is easy to forget the immediacy of the existential threat.

Time and almost uninterrupted prosperity have lulled Australians into taking much for granted. Today’s difficulties are a reminder that the nation we inherited was forged by a generation for whom privation and sacrifice were a normal part of life. The men and women who saved Australia had already lived through the Depression. Some who rallied to defend our homeland had already endured the carnage of the Western Front in World War I. To modern sensibilities, their courage, endurance and patriotism may seem unattainable. Yet it is our legacy, to replicate rather than romanticise. The COVID-19 pandemic offers us the challenge to reflect on whether their sacrifice was in vain and whether we are worthy custodians of the way of life bequeathed to us. The stories of several ordinary Australians personify the spirit that sustained us.

This week brought overdue recognition of the heroism of a young naval man, Teddy Sheean, 18, who died manning his gun as his ship sank. The posthumous award of his Victoria Cross reminds us of the qualities that generation of Australians possessed — the noblest elements of our national character. Alf Carpenter, 103, our oldest surviving veteran of the conflict, learned of the Japanese surrender while recovering from malaria in hospital. He is one of the dwindling band of 12,000 survivors of the nearly one million Australians who served in uniform in the war. On the home front, the courage of civilians, including war widows, sustained the nation.

No aspect of Australian life was immune to the seismic forces generated by the war. The entire nation mobilised after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Modern Australia was forged in the furnace of the conflict. Under prime minister John Curtin, Australia unabashedly “looked to America” as our indispensable military ally. US maritime supremacy in the Pacific continues to provide the foundation of our national security. But less than 20 years after the cessation of hostilities, Japan and Australia had become significant economic partners. Wounds healed. Swords were sheathed and today Japan is a valuable ally whose interests in responding to the revisionist agenda of China align closely with ours. Japanese soldiers served alongside our Diggers in East Timor and Iraq. Who would have ventured to predict that in 1945?

Post-war, our society and economy were transformed. The commonwealth took over income taxation from the states, a momentous change in the way our federation functioned. Women had entered traditionally male occupations during the war on an unprecedented scale and have never been confined to domestic work since. This was a social revolution born of necessity. Labor flirted with the same model of socialism and nationalisation as its British counterpart. But such measures were ultimately rejected by the High Court and the Australian people, who elected Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, in 1949 on a platform built on the sentiments expressed in his “forgotten people” radio address of May 1942. Bipartisan support for the US alliance and free enterprise were enduring legacies of the war. So was our ambitious immigration growth strategy, driven initially by fears that our continent was too sparsely populated to repel another invader.

Some of the lessons of the war have been neglected. Defence procurement is slow, expensive and reliant on foreign expertise. That granite figure of wartime industrial improvisation, Essington Lewis, would be bewildered at the parlous state of manufacturing. As historian Geoffrey Blainey reminds us in Inquirer on Saturday, draconian security measures were in place throughout the war. Yet our democracy survived. Parliaments continued to sit. Elections were held. Professor Blainey provides a valuable perspective to the ephemeral, emotive nonsense in some of the discourse about COVID-19. Australians have survived more deadly, direct threats than this virus. From 1939 to 1945 we did it through shared sacrifice, improvisation and an ability to focus on substantial challenges, not ideological pointscoring. There is much to learn from the generation who celebrated VP Day.