In 1942, Lockheed’s production lines in Burbank, California were operating at full stretch, turning out P-38 twin-engine fighters for deployment in the Pacific. Before the aircraft could engage the Japanese, however, they first had to survive an encounter with another enemy: the stevedores who controlled Australian ports.

Hundreds of thousands of Australians were in uniform and the country felt threatened by invasion. At the Breakfast Creek docks in Brisbane, however, the unionized workforce went to war with U.S. Military Police who were supervising the transfer of supplies.

The laborers, known in the Australian vernacular as wharfies, took umbrage when M.P.s searched their lunch bags and recovered more than 800 cartons of cigarettes. Brigadier-General Elliott R. Thorpe, who was stationed in General Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific headquarters, recalls what happened next:

As a means of “getting even” with the “bloody American MPs” the wharfies proceeded to wreck four P-38 fighter planes that had been shipped from the United States.

They simply hooked the lifting crane onto the planes and, without unbolting the planes from the decks, would signal the hoisting engineers to lift, which effectively tore the planes to pieces.

Australia’s Secret Warpresents a catalogue of similar stories in a confronting counter-narrative to more familiar wartime stories of courage, brotherhood, and sacrifice. The evidence gives rise to two important questions. First, what drove the unionized workforces in Australia’s ports, coal mines, and steel mills to disrupt the Allied war effort in such a reckless and