When Australia Was Under Siege

In the spring of 1942, the people of Australia felt that they were under siege. They had every reason to believe so. In the opening months of the Pacific War, Australians had watched one Allied bastion after another fall to the forces of Japan’s Rising Sun. Hong Kong collapsed almost immediately. The key American islands of Wake and Guam quickly followed. But the earthquake than shook the defense of the entire region occurred when the British Army in Singapore, which included Australian troops, surrendered to a numerically inferior Japanese force. Conquest of the Dutch East Indies came quickly afterwards. Only in the Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur’s Filipino-American army on the Bataan Peninsula stubbornly held out, had the Japanese been held in check.

By this time, Australia had already come under direct attack. With the usual supply lines already cut, all Allied support to the Philippines and Dutch East Indies had to be funneled through the northern Australian port of Darwin. Japan’s planners took notice of Darwin’s importance. As Japanese forces prepared to wrap up their East Indies conquest, Tokyo sent Admiral Nagumo’s powerful carrier force, Kibu Butai, into the Indian Ocean to strike the British Royal Navy at Colombo, Ceylon, and block all lines of Allied retreat from Java. Sailing close to Australia, the six carriers launched a devastating air raid against Darwin, essentially destroying the town.  Savaging ships and aircraft in the area, the Japanese sailed on to pummel the Royal Navy near Ceylon and chase the remaining ships out into the Indian Ocean.

Many people in Australian coastal ports panicked. With Kibu Butai roaming the Indian Ocean at will, residents feared further air attacks or even bombardment by battleships. Many relocated as far inland as they could afford. Such fears were prevalent in the southwestern cities off Perth and its port, Freemantle.  These offered the only practical haven to the defeated Allied Naval forces trying to escape Java.

The situation to the north continued to deteriorate. Extending their East Indies conquest, the Japanese seized the Admiralty Islands and New Britain, with its magnificent harbor of Rabaul. Landings soon followed at Lae and Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea.

In Mid-March, 1942, President Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to break through the Japanese blockade and take command in Australia. When he reached Melbourne, he was appalled to discover that he had few forces at his disposal. Australia’s Army was in the Middle East fighting Rommel or in Japanese POW camps in Singapore. Australia was, in fact, very vulnerable to invasion. Continued air strikes against Darwin from the former Dutch East Indies and the appearance of enemy submarines off both the east and west coasts of Australia emphasized its vulnerability.

This is the situation into which I thrust my characters in my new novel, Endure the Cruel Sun (working title). Those who have read my second novel, Hold Back the Sun, will remember some of them at once. Dutch officers, Colonel Jan Dijker and Captain Garrit Laterveer, are prisoners of the Japanese. Unfortunately for the two officers, the Nazi Gestapo had asked that they be returned to Europe by submarine. Nurse Catherine van Zweden, Garrit’s fiancé, is in a civilian internment camp. What fate does the cruel Japanese Colonel Katsura Okuma have in store for her?

Dutch intelligence in Australia learns of the Gestapo’s request as a result of Allied codebreaking. They scramble to determine if there is any possibility of rescuing the former master spy and air ace.

Jack Sewell, promoted to Lieutenant Commander, now commands the old four-stack destroyer, Rust. With Japan marshaling for a full scale invasion of New Guinea, Allied naval commanders dragoon Rust into the Royal Australian Navy for the looming naval battle to seal Australia’s fate.

I plan to publish Endure the Cruel Sun early next fall. Those who have yet to read HoldBack the Sun may want to check it out before release of the new book.

On Amazon.com, Hold Back the Sun has 131 reviews with a 4.2 out of 5 stars overall rating. Forty-three percent of the reviews are five-star.

---

Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, was released on Kindle on September 15, 2015, and a paperback version will be following.  For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.  

---

Return to the Southwest Pacific

After venturing into different genres and different decades, I am returning to my first writing subject—The Second World War. Although my muse deserted me for a few months, she is back in full force, churning out scenes of combat, self-sacrifice, espionage, and romance. The venue is once again the Southwest Pacific Theater in the crucial middle months of 1942.

When I published my bestselling novel, HOLD BACK THE SUN (HBTS), I left several pieces of unfinished business in Java and Australia. My principal Dutch characters were in the hands of the Japanese conquerors. Having lost almost their entire strike force in the battles around Java, Allied naval forces were in disarray. Only in the Philippines, where General MacArthur’s Filipino-American Army still held out stubbornly on the Bataan Peninsula, had Japan’s forces been held in check.

My next novel, ENDURE THE CRUEL SUN (working title), begins about the time that HBTS concluded. Java has just fallen. Japanese forces seize islands north of Australia from the Allies. Steadily advancing eastward, a string of Japanese island air bases threatens to cut the essential shipping lanes between Pearl Harbor and Australia and New Zealand.

Having lost their Battle Fleet at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy responds with their last ace-in-the-hole: the four aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet.  Air strikes against Japan’s outlying island bases culminate with a raid on landings in progress in New Guinea. Heavily outnumbered in ships, the Americans have one tremendous advantage: Their newly-won ability to read JN25b, the principal Japanese naval code. The Coral Sea east of Australia becomes the pivotal battleground of the Pacific War. Jack Sewell, the destroyer officer from HBTS, is in the middle of the action.

Again, I am dealing with an international cast of characters. Besides Jack, Dutch officers Jan Dijker and Garrit Laterveer, are again in play. Nurse Christine van Zweden, Garrit’s fiancé, finds herself facing an impossible choice dictated by HBTS’s arch villain, Japanese Colonel Katsura Okuma. And across the globe in Germany, the Gestapo lusts to get its hands on Dijker, formerly the British Special Operations Executive’s key spy in Occupied Holland.

Jack Sewell’s new love interest is an American Navy nurse. Her adventures include being a surgical nurse in the jungle hospitals on Bataan, escaping to Corregidor just before Bataan surrenders, and then boarding a submarine to Australia on the night before Corregidor capitulates.

I’m about a third of the way through writing ENDURE THE CRUEL SUN. I hope to publish it sometime next fall.  Look for promotional posts near the end of summer.

---

Warren Bell is an author of historical fiction.  He spent 29 years as a US Naval Officer, and has traveled to most of the places in the world that he writes about.  A long-time World War II-buff, his first two novels, Fall Eagle One and Hold Back the Sun are set during World War II.  His third novel, Asphalt and Blood, follows the US Navy Seabees in Vietnam.  His most recent novel, Snowflakes in July, was released on Kindle on September 15, 2015, and a paperback version will be following.  For more about Warren Bell, visit his website at: wbellauthor.com or see him on twitter @wbellauthor.  

---

Gender-Based Book Classifications: Still Relevant?

When I was working with an agent on my first book, Fall Eagle One, the agent called my action/adventure novel, “a boy book.” After publication, one of my biggest surprises was the large number of women readers who really like the book. I never envisioned that a World War 2 story about German aviators flying to the U.S. to kill President Roosevelt would find a following among women. I should have known better. With stereotypes about the respective roles of men and women rapidly evolving from those that existed in my youth, I should have anticipated that the barriers between gender-based book classifications would also begin to blur.

My own reading experience should have alerted me. Prior to becoming an Indie author at 75, I was a voracious reader, plowing through four-six books a week. Once I discovered that I liked a writer, I would read every book in the library that he had written. After finishing all of Jonathan Kellerman’s police thrillers, I read one by his wife, Faye Kellerman, on a whim. I found myself enthralled. Ms. Kellerman writes excellent police fiction. With my eyes finally opened, I began reading other women crime thriller authors as well. They were all great reads. Women write action/adventure that stacks up very well against that by male authors. But do women like to read action/adventure? My experience with both of my published novels leads me to believe that they do.

I believe that the days when men wrote books for men to read and women wrote books for only women are becoming a phenomenon of the past. Consider the genre of erotica, once the exclusive purview of men, both as authors and consumers. Then, when Rosemary Rogers published her novel, The Insiders, in the 1970s, a Time Magazine reviewer proclaimed that she had invented a new genre: pornography for women. Fast forward to the 2010s. Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James took the publishing world by storm. Most reports suggest that the majority of Ms. James’s readers are also women, but I’ll bet that a lot are men. It would be interesting to sample the audiences of the upcoming movie.

Books written for children can also become wildly popular with adults. Look at the runaway success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Ms. Rowling clearly enchanted boys, girls, men, and women. As Bob Dylan wrote, “The times, they are a changing.”

Stereotyped gender roles are fast fading from Western society, and I think this to be a good thing.  I believe strongly in individual freedom. The old “one-size-fits-all” way of viewing human relationships is no longer acceptable to emerging Western generations. I would not want any of the women in my life, whatever their age, to be forced into a gender-role straight jacket.