4/6/2023 0 Comments Farrago fiction password![]() He also gets the number of the Green Island radar unit wrong. Significantly, Colebatch doesn’t give a date, but there is no American record, official or unofficial, of 16 of these aircraft and their 32 crew members lost in this way at any time, as there surely would be had it happened. The Americans did not fly the Vultee Vengeance in combat, so they made no raid on Rabaul. He claimed - with no evidence at all - that the valves for the radar had been stolen by wharfies. Colebatch alleges that a flight of 16 American Vultee Vengeance dive bombers returning from a raid on Rabaul crashed into the sea off New Britain because the radar station at their base on Green Island was not working. The second example is worse, if anything. He does not reveal who this Monks might be, but there was no soldier or POW of that name in WWII. Monks, dated 1995, 50 years after the event and 20 years ago. Colebatch gives his only source for this nonsense as a letter from one W.S. The history of HMS Speaker, written by one of the ship’s officers and available online, makes no mention of this supposed scandal. Newspaper accounts of their return report the men were greeted by cheering crowds the day they arrived. ![]() The wharfies would not allow them ashore to meet their loved ones for 36 hours. In October 1945, he says, these men were held penned-up on a British aircraft carrier, HMS Speaker, which had brought them home. In his introduction, Colebatch claims that a strike by wharf labourers in Sydney kept soldiers returning from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps away from their families. It’s hard to know where to begin on this travesty, but here are two examples. It was a joint winner of the history award with Broken Nation, Professor Joan Beaumont’s splendid book about Australia in World War I. Colebatch and published - no surprise here - by the right-wing Quadrant magazine. The book is Australia’s Secret War, subtitled How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II, by Western Australian writer Hal G.P. At the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, handed out in Melbourne, the prize for history went to a right-wing rant against Australian trade unions, an ideological tract that includes errors, hearsay, exaggeration and in some cases, sheer fiction and fantasy. The infamous culture wars sank to a sorry new low last night.
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