Plot
The point of divergence within the story is the loss of the Battle of the Coral Sea by the Allies. Unlike real history, the Imperial Japanese Navy manage to inflict heavy casualties upon the American naval forces. After a three-day engagement, with the loss of four capital ships and dozens of smaller craft, the Allies are forced to retreat.
The invasion of Australia begins on 12 June 1942, with the Japanese landing at Darwin, Cooktown and Cairns. A major assault is conducted on the New South Wales town of Newcastle, leading to the Battle of Newcastle, where two of the story's characters (Sawtell and Counihan) had previously seen action. The Japanese also make landings at Tweed Heads, Coffs Harbour and the Hawkesbury River. Sydney is subjected to naval bombardment and is dive-bombed by aircraft from the carrier Zuikaku. Sydney is evacuated in a rather chaotic and disorganised manner. In early July 1942, General Douglas MacArthur and the remnants of the US 41st Division sail from Melbourne and retreat to New Zealand. The Australian Federal government (presumably John Curtin and his cabinet) withdraw from Canberra and set up in Perth. It is noted that by the end of that year, members of the Volunteer Defence Corps are doing their best to implement the scorched earth policy to refuse the enemy access to any resources.
Read more about this topic: The Bush Soldiers
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)