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I guess it's a trade-off. They flew right through the war zone in Asia, Darwin was being bombed, so was Indonesia, and then they almost got taken out by a subm

• gumby 9y ago
  We're talking the first 30 days of the war. Singapore hadn't fallen yet, nor had Djakarta. Even though Darwin had been bombed (and my grandmother said that left her convinced that the whole country was about to be invaded) in reality Australia was a long way from Japanese forces. (Of course so was Hawaii). I was wrong by the way about French Indochina which had been taken after the fall of France. So hairy, but not as hairy as it would be two months later. They couldn't know that at the time of course, but they had little choice. The only other alternative would have been to stay in Aukland and then be sucked up into the US war machine as MacArthur retreated to Australia.
  • gumby 9y ago
    I can't edit, so I want to clarify that when I wrote, "first 30 days of the war" I meant from the perspective of the plane's crew and most of the regions they planned to fly through. There were millions in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, Indochina, Germany, France, Poland, etc for whom the war had been going on for years or decades.