As the nation’s wartime leader, Prime Minister John Curtin had undergone a transformation. Before the war he had often made clear that the Labor Party was opposed to Australian involvement in another European war. After Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced on 3 September 1939 that Australia was at war with Germany, Labor had reiterated its objection to sending forces overseas. When the government decided to send the Second AIF’s 6th Division to the Middle East in early 1940, Labor once again registered its disagreement.
However, Curtin changed his mind in February 1940 when, with an election looming, he announced that a Labor government would reinforce the Second AIF, implicitly endorsing Australia’s involvement in the war in Europe and North Africa. His main focus, though, remained the Pacific. Until the federal election in August 1943, Curtin rejected all proposals that he should travel overseas, including those from President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to visit Washington. In 1944, however, he decided to visit the United States and Canada en route to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London.
Curtin was scheduled to visit Waddington during his forthcoming trip, but not 460 Squadron at Binbrook. As a fellow Western Australian, Commander Hughie Edwards was keen for the Prime Minister to visit his station, but he understood Overseas Headquarters was decidedly cool on the idea because of the recent incident in which Stanley Bruce had been insulted. Hughie assured the hierarchy that such a thing would not happen again, and Binbrook was added to the Prime Minister’s itinerary.
Australia had sent several parliamentarians to wartime Europe, starting with Menzies’ ‘grand tour’ of the Middle East and England in early 1941. In March 1942, following Japan’s entry into the war and its southward thrust towards Australia, the Curtin government had dispatched Dr H.V. Evatt, the Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, to Washington and London to state Australia’s needs, which included Spitfire fighters. In London, apparently by accident, Evatt discovered that Britain and the United States were committed to a ‘beat Hitler first’ strategy. Known for a prickly, abrasive style that had already ruffled feathers in both countries, Evatt contained his outrage and concentrated on building bridges with the British, winning a promise from Churchill to send three Spitfire squadrons to Australia.
While in London, Evatt showed a keen interest in the RAAF and what they were doing. Wrigley took him on several visits to RAAF stations, including to the Mount Batten station in Plymouth, where 10 Squadron RAAF, a maritime patrol unit, was based. Evatt asked Wrigley to arrange for the commanding officer ‘to get the lads together so that I can talk to them’. While most of the RAAF boys listened closely to Evatt’s address, Wrigley noticed two sergeants in the background ‘chatting away there and looking at Evatt and then at each other and a smile’. He quickly realised that they were up to something. When Evatt finished, he asked for questions. One of the sergeants asked a question that was purely political.
Evatt looked at him in a very fierce way and said, ‘Sergeant, I think that your rank, three stripes is a sergeant, isn’t it?’ And the reply was, ‘Yes, sir.’ Well, Evatt said, ‘I have come here as one Australian visiting a number of Australians engaged in very serious tasks. And I came here to say, ‘How do you do’ to you and to tell you something about what’s going on in Australia which you might be interested in but if you’re going to drag politics into this, then I’m leaving and I won’t come again.’ So that was Evatt’s attitude.
Army Minister Frank Forde followed Evatt, and Wrigley quickly saw that, unlike Evatt, he had politics uppermost in mind.
Forde made his visits a purely electioneering stunt. He had a secretary with him, he asked each man as he went along where he came from. And if he was a Queenslander [like Forde], he’d say, ‘Oh yes, your father’s alive? What does he do?’ And so on and so on. And, ‘Where do you live? Make a note of that will you.’ And he did—all except people from that state he just passed by. Took no notice. So I came to the conclusion that was purely electioneering. Although I couldn’t say so on the spot.
When Arthur Drakeford, Minister for the Air, came through, Wrigley expected him to take a keen interest in what the Australians were doing, especially after the minister asked him to arrange for a visit to one of the squadrons and organise transport there. Picked up after breakfast by Wrigley and another senior officer, Drakeford said he wanted to visit an optician. After a ninety-minute consultation, they set off for the squadron, where they were expected at 11 a.m. But on the way, Drakeford asked to do a spot of sightseeing, before deciding he wanted lunch, much to Wrigley’s dismay.
I tried to restrain him from that but I couldn’t and he went to lunch. He had Air Marshal [Dickie] Williams with him. They wanted me in too but I said I was in the habit of doing without lunch. We arrived at the squadron at three o’clock in the afternoon. And it was a cold wintry day, a heavy mist right down onto the ground so that flying had been cancelled for the day. When that happened, the troops were usually given local leave for the day. They’d missed out on that and by the time the minister arrived, the heaters in the lecture hut had gone out and it was icy cold and they had to put up with a meandering talk from Drakeford which lasted for a good half hour. And then he departed and that was that.
Although he was not a Labor supporter, Rollo Kingsford-Smith had voted for Curtin in the 1943 election, when all Australians in England received ballot papers. Rollo reasoned that given the political squabbles between the United Australia Party and the Country Party, together with the attacks on Menzies by his own party, the conservative parties could not give Australia effective government. Their leader, whoever he might be, would therefore be unable to provide the leadership the country needed in the stress of war.
Curtin’s performance had impressed Rollo greatly. Although Australia was in peril from the Japanese, almost all the nation’s fighting forces were far away under Britain’s control, and Churchill was in no hurry to release them. It was clear to Rollo that neither Churchill nor his top military staff could understand Curtin’s preoccupation with Australia’s defence at a time when, in ‘their blinkered minds’, he should have been giving priority to global strategy. But Rollo had something closer to home to worry about—what was happening to the replacement crews.
I cannot pretend that Curtin hurried to England because of my complaints about our aircrew reinforcements being hijacked by the UK. It had a lot to do with the overall dissatisfaction by the Australian Government with the conduct of the war by England and with Churchill’s misuse of Australian Army, Navy and Air Force personnel under his government’s control short-sightedly placed there by Menzies early in the war.
From the start of the war, Rollo had been critical of the way Australia’s involvement had been organised. He believed the Menzies government had ‘agreed to make Australia a giant camp to train pilots and navigators, gunners and radio operators to send overseas to serve under the English government directions’. On the other hand, it could be argued that while mistakes were made regarding the command structure, the RAAF had no great expertise to offer Britain in the early stages. But Rollo was nothing if not passionate about the interests of his fellow Australian airmen.
On 19 May 1944, despite a full program ahead of him in London with the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference and talks with Churchill, John Curtin accompanied Wrigley to Waddington to visit 463 and 467 Squadrons. Curtin had made it clear that he wanted to spend as much time as possible with RAAF crews, and Wrigley thought that this station, with its two Lancaster heavy bomber units, would give him a good idea of the work they were doing. Curtin arrived at 6 p.m., just in time to attend the briefings for 463 and 467 Squadrons for that night’s operations, which centred on railway yards at Tours, in France. He chatted with the men and shared a cup of tea with them, thanking them for putting up with him and his questions.
Some, like 467 pilot Dan Conway, missed the planned dinner that night because they were on operational duty, but they were given the chance to meet the prime minister in the officers’ mess. Non-commissioned aircrew also attended and, when questions were invited, some raised the issue of NCO pilots captaining an aircraft when their crew included commissioned officers. Like many, Dan thought this unfair and that any captain should be given a commission—and the appropriate pay increase. ‘Commissioned officers were expected to take the responsibility and make the decisions. However when an NCO pilot flew the aircraft he was traditionally the skipper and gave the orders,’ he would later write. This situation arose in the first place because a limited number of trainees received commissions as pilots ‘off course’. Conway was not alone in thinking that this practice was a hit and miss affair.
The current situation ‘negated the whole principle of the lines of military authority for the saving of a few shillings a day’. That it worked well was a tribute to the goodwill and commonsense of the aircrew. ‘Honest John’ Curtin listened patiently to the submissions and promised to investigate. Soon after, it was announced that all pilots who were captaining multi-engined aircraft would be commissioned. There is nothing like going to the top.
Curtin joined the VIP party at the end of the runway to watch the boys take off. It was still daylight, so the insignia that crews had painted on the various aircraft were clearly visible. Curtin laughed at one freshly painted sign: a ballot form listing Curtin, Jan Smuts of South Africa, Stalin, Churchill and Gandhi, with a cross beside Stalin’s name. Later, Dan Conway was handed a message from the PM reading, ‘Good luck boys—Curtin.’ He duly passed it to the radio operators for transmission.
It had been a quiet night as all the crews landed away due to bad weather at base. When they did get back I copped several protests about the message. Some had interpreted it as, ‘Good luck curtains’ and some wondered whether it was a recall. Which does not say much for our radio standards but something about the tensions of an op and the reactions to extraneous messages. Our Prime Minister, however, did leave behind a favourable impression.
Rollo Kingsford-Smith did not fly with 463 Squadron that night. He was present as the red carpet was unrolled and Curtin dined with officers in the mess at a dinner in his honour. As mess president, Rollo was the host, with Curtin seated on his right, Group Captain Bonham-Carter on his left and Air Vice-Marshal Wrigley sitting opposite. During the dinner a messenger came in and gave Bonham-Carter a note. He then scribbled something on the back of his place card and passed it behind Rollo’s back to the PM. Curtin read it and then asked Rollo if he could make a short announcement. ‘I stood up and requested everybody’s attention for the PM who said, ‘I am delighted to announce that my host Wing Commander Kingsford-Smith has just been given the immediate award of the Distinguished Flying Cross.’ This was a complete surprise to me and my obvious embarrassment was a topic of comment later on.’
Wrigley noted in his diary: ‘It is a long time since I have seen anyone look as embarrassed as Kingsford-Smith did for he had no inkling that anything of this nature was on the way.’
After the dinner, Curtin returned to his hotel to rest until the bombers came back. However, because of thick ground fog, they were all diverted to other stations. Wrigley was in no doubt that the men were impressed by Curtin. ‘What I think pleased them more than anything was that his questions were intelligent ones, where previously a lot of them were very superficial and meant nothing very much. I’m sure that they all appreciated his visit to them. He told them too that he’d tell the Australian people when he got home the sort of work that they were doing.’
An entry in the Operations Record book for 467 Squadron noted that the visit was ‘a big day for both Australian Squadrons’ and had been covered by a large press contingent. It added that the Prime Minister had addressed a meeting of all Australian personnel before watching take-off. ‘Question time kept a good number of ground staff busy firing queries at Mr Curtin, which were answered to the satisfaction of all concerned.’
More important in Rollo’s view, after this visit ‘our reinforcements began to flow again’. At 10 a.m. the next day Curtin travelled to Binbrook to visit 460 Squadron. On behalf of the Binbrook RAAF Welfare Committee, Perc Rodda had been chosen as spokesman for the seventy-five minute meeting in the station’s theatre. In particular, RAAF ground staff wanted their grievances about repatriation raised. Wrigley had suggested to the Australian War Cabinet a repatriation scheme of fifty ground crew a month. At that rate, it would take three years to send home and replace all those currently serving in England. Perc said it was felt that the overseas personnel were ‘being called upon to make an inequitable sacrifice’ compared with the large percentage of RAAF ground staff who had not served outside Australia. He noted that requests for repatriation on compassionate grounds had not received the sympathetic consideration they deserved. Curtin said he ‘fully appreciated’ the desire of men to be sent home after lengthy service overseas, adding ‘all that was possible would be done’.
And it was. By the end of the month the Australian War Cabinet had approved the start of negotiations with the British government for the return of ground staff at a rate of 100 men every second month, with a three-year qualifying period. Six weeks later, Churchill agreed to the plan. At that time there were 1486 ground crew in the United Kingdom, of whom 740 had been there for more than three years.
Sensing the undercurrent of discontent, Curtin expressed his appreciation of the service that members of the RAAF were rendering in England. He assured them that the ‘government and the people of Australia had a full realisation of the important and gallant part they were taking in the defeat of the enemy’. He added that there was ‘no suggestion in any reasonable man’s mind that the personnel in England were not playing as effective a role in the defeat of the Axis powers generally as they would if they were operating from Australian or adjacent bases’. This was a clear reference to a developing view in Australia that Australians should not be serving in Europe while the Japanese in the Pacific were still a threat. Despite Curtin’s reassurance, however, popular appreciation of the contribution the RAAF in Europe was making to the total war effort would continue to deteriorate.
Curtin also undertook to clear up another contentious issue: pyjamas, or the lack of them in a cold climate. The British Board of Trade would not permit the issue of coupons [for pyjamas] to RAAF personnel below commissioned rank because this would create a precedent. However, the Australian Comforts Fund had undertaken to supply a quantity of pyjamas to non-commissioned RAAF personnel.
The meeting over, Curtin complimented Perc on his handling of the discussion and headed off for lunch with officers before watching 460 Squadron’s veteran Lancaster ‘G for George’—which had flown a record ninety operations—take off on its last war flight. The PM remained at the airfield until the last 460 Lancaster had left to join the raid on Tours and had the same good luck message flashed to the pilots as he had at Waddington—fortunately with no ensuing confusion.