This is John Bachelor, speaking with my good friend and colleague Gregory Coppley, editor and publisher of Defense and Foreign Affairs.

He's in Perth, Australia looking at how Australia became so dependent upon the United States, how its sovereignty depends upon

the United States military apparatus.

It begins, Gregory identifies, with 1942 and the surrender of Singapore.

Today it is unhappily unable to defend itself

according to Gregory without the US aid.

And that can be reversed. Not yet. Here's the beginning, 1942, Singapore, the Imperial

Japanese Army and Navy attack. And Australia Australia more of this tonight.

Well it was a series of Prime Ministers but it did start with the wartime

Prime Minister John Curtin who basically saw there was no alternative for Australia

because Australia lost so many troops trying to support the British forces in Malaya and

Singapore and lost them all as prisoners of war largely because the

military leaders there would not let Australians avoid capture by the Japanese by abandoning Singapore.

So the British military leadership at the time insisted that Australians had to join with the Brits

and surrender en masse to the Japanese and of course that meant tens many tens of thousands of Australian troops going

into a Japanese labor camps and the like so basically Australia had to look to the

United States because Australia was not really ready for war at that

stage and the United States proved to be a very beneficial and supportive ally

although the United States absolutely needed Australia's geography

if it was ever to defeat the Japanese at that stage.