Toward Australia

At tiny Broome (pop. 750) in western Australia, there is a Japanese cemetery. In it rest Japanese divers who went to Australia's pearling grounds, dove to depths no white man would attempt, and died at their labors. Australians knew that Japanese divers, shore laborers and fishermen for years had done other chores as well: they had minutely mapped the northern coasts, sent back home better charts than any in Sydney or Melbourne.

Last week Japanese Zero fighters roared over the graves at Broome. Machine guns and aircraft cannon peppered the town and its airdrome, while 650 miles around the curve of the coast, at Wyndham, the Zeros struck again. At the oft-hit port of Darwin, they completed a pattern of things to come: Darwin, Wyndham, Broome are places to be invaded. With them in hand, the Japs would command Australia's northern coast, the wild interior desert which lies between the upper coast and southern Australia.

With one other invasion blow, the Japs could grab all they need of Australia for their immediate purposes. This blow would probably fall on two points: Cape York at the northern extremity of Australia's eastern coast, Gladstone at its center. Object: to close the inland waterway between the eastern shore and 1,200-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, give the Japs a protected channel more than half way from Cape York to the great port and naval base at Sydney. In Gladstone the Japs would take away one of the few oil depots the Allies have on the Queensland coast, would get a take-off point for air assault on the populous south.

The Japs last week began to execute this invasion plan. When they landed forces at Salamaua and Lae in Australia's outlying New Guinea, they were 400 miles from Cape York. Again they bombed Port Moresby, New Guinea's chief sea town. They were almost ready to invade Australia.

London and Washington, even the hard realists at Melbourne and Sydney, seemed to think that the Japs might be content for the present with drives at northern and northeastern Australia. If so, the U.S. and Australia would have time to amass land, air and naval forces in the south. But "to be content for the present" did not sound like the Japs of Indo-China, Manila, Malaya, Singapore, Burma and Java.

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