Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy - Ludwig von Mises ...

December 6, Part 1 265
told him that he had just ordered four of his destroyers, then at
Balikpapan (Borneo), to join Phillips’s force.” 40 Phillips arrived
back in Singapore on the morning of December 7 (December 6,
Washington time).
Th e entire region was on the alert. “[B]ecause of the movement
of Japanese task forces southward and possibly into the China
Sea,” a conference was called in Australia early in December by
Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Burnett, chief of staff , of the
Royal Australian Air Force. In attendance were representatives of
the British, Dutch, and American governments—Colonel Van S.
Merle-Smith, U.S. military attaché at the legation in Melbourne;
Commander Salm, the Dutch Indies naval liaison offi cer to the
Australian government; Lieutenant Robert H. O’Dell, then assistant
military attaché in Australia; and Air Commodore Hewitt,
the Royal Australian Air Force intelligence offi cer, who came and
went during the conference. 41
“[U]pon learning of Japanese naval movements out of Palau,”
one of the Caroline Islands less than 600 miles north of the Dutch
East Indies, the Netherlands Far East Command had ordered
on December 6 the execution of mobilization Plan A-2. 42 War
Plan A-2 was “a mutual agreement among Britain, Holland (the
Indies), America and Australia” in line with the ADB conversations
at Singapore in the spring of 1941. 43
Th e Australians had off ered to furnish some aircraft to the
Dutch. But then planes reached Koepang on the island of Dutch
Timor and the Netherlands command did not consider Australian
40Wigmore, Th e Japanese Th rust, p. 122.
41Joint Committee, Pearl Harbor Attack, part 29, p. 2300, testimony before
APHB of O’Dell.
42Ibid., part 30, p. 3223 (APHB Exhibit No. 70, Exhibit A, “Summary of
Far Eastern Documents” paragraph FE 366). See also ibid., part 9, p. 4565,
Bratton testimony before the Joint Committee.
43Ibid., part 29, p. 2303, O’Dell testimony before the APHB.