Front page of the Army News , produced in Darwin, for circulation on that fateful day- February 19,1942. Costing a penny, it carried the advice on its masthead to MEMORISE THESE AIR RAID SIRENS! Of course, there were no sirens because the warning from the Tiwi Islands was not acted upon , with catastrophic results .
A report on the fall of "impregnable" Singapore contained an extract from a speech by Prime Minister Curtin in which he said the nation must now resist an enemy which threatened to invade Australia. "Our honeymoon has finished ," he said . "It is now work or fight as we've never worked or fought before. The hours previously devoted to sport and leisure must now be given to war duties. Every citizen has a parallel duty to that of the man in the fighting forces. As things stand today in Australia , brains and brawn are better than either bets or beer for the unflagging resistance which would enable us not to become a people governed by others."
In Chicago, eminent writer and journalist, H. R."Red " Knickerbocker , booted out of Berlin by Hitler, was reported as saying that with the fall of Singapore, Java would go and there might be an attack on Australia, followed by an attack on continental USA. It was, he said, the bounden duty of the US to strain every nerve and effort to send to Australia every available fighter bomber and masses of army marines and navy. The Lieutenant -Governor General of the Netherlands, Dr Van Mook, in Sydney , said that Australia was safe from immediate attack.
* The Australian naval officer on the front page of Army News was Captain J.A.Collins , recently promoted to Commodore, skipper of HMAS Sydney when it was lost in action with the disguised German raider, Kormoran .
