‘Why cannot one squadron of fighters be sent out from North Africa? Why cannot some positive commitment be entered into regarding naval reinforcement of Singapore? At this stage misty generalisations will please…the Japanese and nobody else’
—Sir Robert Menzies, Australian Prime Minister, 1939–41
Afew hundred Australian militia troops stood between the Japanese and Port Moresby. This was the miserable state of Australian arms in the first week of August 1942. The nation was near-defenceless on the eve of the invasion of its mandated territories. The main causes were the gross neglect of national security and the blind subservience to Britain that had driven prewar defence policy and denuded Australia of arms and troops. The remedy was to be found in the quiet fortitude and extraordinary determination of one man.
That man was not Robert Menzies. When Britain declared war on Germany, Menzies, then Australian prime minister, reluctantly decided to send an expeditionary force abroad. He was deeply suspicious of Japanese intentions. But he received assurances from Britain that the Japanese threat was not serious; in any event, Fortress Singapore would defend Australia. And he was answerable to the local press, who reflected the popular itch to ‘bash the Hun’—after all, hadn’t little New Zealand just raised an expeditionary army?
The decision chimed with Menzies’ personal prejudices. He was an Anglophile and imperialist of the old school.* ‘Australians are…good Australians because they are unhesitatingly British,’ he said in a radio broadcast, in the context of the war effort. In any case, the dispatch of Australian troops acquired an irresistible logic once war broke out. Menzies told the Australian people that it was his ‘melancholy duty’ to inform them that ‘they were at war with Germany’ within hours of Neville Chamberlain committing Britain. There was no parliamentary or public debate. And so, 25 years after the carnage of Gallipoli, a few men too old to fight sent a new generation of young troops to a foreign killing field. Menzies’ decision was extremely popular at home, and reflected the cloying Anglophilia of a nation deeply obeisant to British demands.
To feed the British war effort, Australia unquestioningly sent most of its core army, navy and air force to the European and North African theatres of war. The nation was essentially unprotected. The facts speak with deadening force: throughout 1939–40 Australia dispatched to the Middle East and Singapore four divisions (about 80,000) of its fittest young men. Even on 8 December that year—the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor**—118,129 Australian Imperial Force troops were serving overseas, up by almost 10,000 on the previous fortnight.1 Just 31,951 remained at home.*** Not until January 1942—and the invasion of Rabaul—did the flow cease. According to Sir Paul Hasluck, the historian and former governor-general, 120,945 Australian military personnel were overseas that month. The home guard—the militia—were neither trained nor equipped to make up for this colossal loss of manpower. One splenetic Labor backbencher described this exodus as a ‘traitorous act’, and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Menzies Government.*
Home air and naval defence were virtually non-existent in 1939–41. The Royal Australian Navy became a mere appendage of British sea power; Australia’s few warships were placed under the command of the Admiralty in the Mediterranean; our six destroyers handed over in exchange for a promised two British cruisers, neither of which reached Australian waters. Swathes of the Australian coastline were left vulnerable.
Witness the navy’s ‘Coordinated Plans’ of 29 August 1941 for the sea defence of the vast eastern seaboard: just eighteen minesweepers, 34 auxiliary minesweepers, and 34 motor patrol boats were on duty guarding Australian waters. The naval shield might have apprehended a balsa canoe, but little else.2
The Royal Australian Air Force offered no conceivable domestic deterrent because Australia’s best young pilots were absorbed into Britain’s air force, the Royal Air Force, via the Empire Air Training Scheme. In January 1941, 23 air squadrons were either serving abroad or earmarked for dispatch; and by September 1941, 12,000 Australian pilots had either been sent or were in training for overseas service. At a stroke, this severely reduced the nation’s air defence capacity. Abroad the Australian airmen were the forgotten ‘Few’: the RAAF’s 460 Squadron, for example, flew more Lancaster missions and dropped a greater tonnage of bombs over Germany than any other squadron in Britain’s Bomber Command. Back home, on the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Australia had just two air squadrons, each equipped with two flying boats and six Catalinas.
With Australia’s best trained soldiers, sailors, and pilots abroad, who was left behind on the eve of the declaration of war with Japan? ‘A core of several thousand regulars supplemented by…part-time militiamen,’ notes historian David Day. These were the disdained chocos, ‘equipped for combat in the style of the Great War’.3 The nation’s home defences were ‘unprepared, muddled and confused’, stated the Daily Telegraph.4 In June 1940, the defence chiefs could not envisage raising a trained and equipped home army of 130,000 men and bleakly conceded that were Japan to invade, Australia’s guns and ammunition ‘would not last the defenders more than a month’.5
‘That is what you cannot tell the public,’ warned Sir Keith Murdoch, father of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and then Menzies’ Director-General of Information.6 Menzies heeded this advice, and the nation’s defencelessness remained a well-kept secret. The press were muzzled or editorially hijacked, and Murdoch found himself the target of ridicule in the newspapers he did not control, until his resignation from the post of chief censor in December 1940.
Australia needed weapons as well as men. By 1939, the country was virtually unarmed. Its defence spending was a mere 1.06 per cent of national income in 1936–37, far less than Britain’s. Even when the money was available, it wasn’t spent. By 1939, not a third of the £25 million earmarked two years earlier for capital defence equipment had been spent.7 As late as 1939–40, Australian war spending amounted to a mere 4.9 per cent of gross national expenditure. To put this in perspective, the figure reached 36.8 per cent in 1942–43 under Prime Minister John Curtin, a demonstrably reformed pacifist.
The gravest weakness was aircraft, a flaw to which Curtin repeatedly drew attention as Leader of the Opposition. At the declaration of the war in the Pacific, the aircraft reserved for home defence numbered 101 Wirraways, normally used for training; 53 Hudson bombers; twelve Catalinas and nine Seagulls. There were not enough fully trained crews to man the ‘first line aircraft’—most pilots were then fighting in Britain. To make up the shortfall, 32 fresh squadrons had to be built—a mammoth task that fell to Essington Lewis, nicknamed the ‘Steel Tzar’, the brilliant former BHP head whom Curtin appointed Director-General of Aircraft Production at the end of 1941.8
Even if Britain had sent a Spitfire squadron when initially requested, Australia had only a fifth of the aviation fuel necessary to fight an air war.9 In January 1942, there were no anti-aircraft guns.10 Dozens of aircraft ordered from America were diverted to Britain during the evacuation of Dunkirk. The nation had no effective tanks, fighter planes or heavy bombers, and none in prospect.11 When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, there were just ten light training tanks in the country—and 70 light tanks on order.
The nation’s light arms industry was a joke. Of the prized Vickers machine-guns manufactured locally at the rate of 200 a month, 125 were destined for the British army in India; of the rest just twenty found their way into the Australian army.12 Rifles were in short supply; anti-tank weapons and light machine-guns—mostly the old Lewis World War I models—would equip the army at merely half-strength. As late as April 1941, there were no mines to protect the nation’s ports—an open invitation to the enemy.
Even by 1942, the situation was dire. In February, after the fall of Singapore, Australian arms production showed a deficiency of 32,000 rifles; 250 heavy and 1000 light anti-aircraft guns; and 7000 light machine guns.13 In the same month, only 300 Bren guns were produced, and just 1590 were in stock.
Oddly, 80 per cent of the required bullets were available; there just weren’t sufficient guns to fire them. Most seriously, as late as April 1942, Australia had a mere 185 tanks to defend the largest island on earth. It is true that arms production would soon rise dramatically, and that American firepower would arrive. Even so, when the Japanese attacked Darwin in February 1942, Australia was a nation on its knees.
We need not delve too deeply into the seeds of this feeble legacy. Suffice to say Menzies’ belated efforts to re-equip Australia failed to arrest decades of neglect. In 1933, the state of the defence force ‘had reached its lowest point for 20 years’, observed Hasluck. The rearmament policies of the late 1930s were too little, too late. Successive governments during the 1930s ignored warnings of the grave risks of Japanese aggression and ‘demonstrated a chronic lack of self-reliance’.14
Menzies was made painfully aware of the Japanese threat, but did little about it. Only the most blinkered could miss the signs: the Manchurian Incident of 1932; the invasion of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking in 1937; the emergence of a belligerent martial regime; and the drumbeat of propaganda championing Japan’s right to an Asian empire and supremacy over the white imperialists. On 27 September 1940 Japan signed a mutual cooperation pact with Germany and Italy, recognising their leadership in Europe in exchange for recognition of Japan as the ruler of ‘Greater East Asia’. Alert to these warnings, Menzies turned constantly to his imagined saviour and cherished mother country, which looked askance at its importunate offspring like an embarrassed parent.
In this polarising world, Menzies sought assurances from Britain of the inviolability of Singapore; these were summarily scotched on 13 June 1940 when a British cable ‘of apocalyptic character’ denied that it would, after all, send reinforcements to Singapore.15
In response, Menzies ratcheted up defence spending and pursued a ‘craven policy of appeasement’ of the Pacific aggressor.16 He sought to trade with Japan when virtually no one else would;America had shut its door on most trade with Japan partly in protest at the latter’s refusal to withdraw from Manchuria. A Menzies olive branch to Japan—Australian scrap iron—earned him the incorrect nickname, ‘Pig Iron Bob’.* His government turned a blind eye to Japan’s conquest of China—an ugly precursor of the Labor Party’s disgraceful collusion with Indonesia after the invasion of East Timor. Indeed, had Menzies not emerged as the nation’s most successful post-war leader he would surely have been remembered, with Chamberlain, whom he admired, as an appeaser of fascism.
Menzies shunned the Americans, perversely insisting on a defence ‘between Australia and Britain, not Australia and America’.17 A gaping void thus lay at the heart of defence policy, to which Sir Frederick Shedden, then the powerful secretary of Australia’s Defence Department, responded by recommending the production of as many aircraft as could be built, as quickly as possible.18
As a last resort, Menzies pleaded for military help from Churchill. His pleas were met with polite obfuscation. A year before the fall of Singapore, Menzies plaintively wrote: ‘Why cannot one squadron of fighters be sent out from North Africa? Why cannot some positive commitment be entered into regarding naval reinforcement of Singapore? At this stage misty generalisations will please…the Japanese and nobody else.’19
Menzies’ own party eventually turned on him, for various reasons, not least of which was the rudderless handling of national security. The Prime Minister complained that he spent a third of his time ‘warding off blows aimed at me…from those who are supposed to be my supporters—“snipers”, people who shoot from behind’.20 In August 1941, to sustain the metaphor, they shot him.
In 1940–41, however, Australians comforted themselves that, if attacked, Britain would immediately send ships and planes to the rescue. Menzies justified the dispatch of more than 100,000 Australian troops overseas on these grounds. The Australian people rather naively imagined their country was a sacred priority in the British schema. In truth, Churchill thought India the jewel in the imperial crown; Australians, he once intemperately muttered, were a people of ‘bad stock’.21
Yet this sense of closeness between the two nations was understandable—on racial, cultural and historical grounds. Most white Australians called themselves ‘British’ in the 1933 census. The emotional link with the mother country was strong and real. The official statistician observed that Australians had the ‘essential characteristics of their British ancestors, with perhaps some accentuation of the desire for freedom from restraint’.22
‘The idea that Britain was “home”,’ noted historian David Day, ‘was a long time dying in the harsh climate of the distant dominion.’23 Such feelings underlay the White Australia Policy, officially in place since Federation, and firmly applied during World War II. Of course, this fed through to anti-Japanese propaganda, and ratcheted up hatred of the Japanese to hysterical heights. Elsewhere it had unexpected consequences. In one disgusting application, black American troops sent to help defend Australia were refused permission to disembark. An Emergency War Cabinet later overturned the ban, and the Negroes, as they were then known, were hidden away on manual duties in the Northern Territory.*
The strongest emotional argument for British military help was the mother country’s historic debt to Australian arms. The point has been thrashed out many times—tediously, no doubt, to British ears. Perhaps this is because it is uncomfortably true. From the birth of (white) Australia, at Federation, in 1901, to the crisis of 1942, the nation put the defence of the British Empire ahead of her own.
No country proportional to its population gave so many lives fighting for British interests as Australia did in the twentieth century. Three hundred thousand young Australian men were sent to Europe during The Great War, in a country of then 4 million people; 61,000 of them died on foreign soil, at Gallipoli and the Western Front; Pozières alone claimed 23,000 Australian casualties within weeks. Australian troops won 63 of the 577 Victoria Crosses awarded in World War I, most posthumously. They were all volunteers. Indeed, Australia suffered the greatest proportional loss of any nation.
The people—from the ordinary man and woman to Menzies himself—naively supposed Britain would demonstrate a reciprocal obligation. Prime ministers instinctively exploited the emotional power of this argument. John Curtin famously declared that Britain would be ‘gravely indicted’ if it failed to help Australia, ‘which sacrificed 60,000 of its men on overseas battlefields in the last war and, at its peril, has sent its naval, military and air forces overseas to fight in this one’.24
It had not escaped Churchill’s notice that the Australians would fight. At the battle of Bardia in January 1941, the Second AIF raised the standard of Gallipoli, charged five hundred miles across the western deserts of Africa, destroyed nine and a half Italian divisions, and captured 130,000 prisoners, 40 tanks and 1290 guns. It was an auspicious start to a campaign that ended with the Siege of Tobruk.
Australia pressed Britain for a guarantee of military support, and its ambassadors in London extracted what they supposed to be a watertight commitment. The wording should have alarmed Menzies’ sharp legal mind: ‘If…Japan set about invading Australia…on a large scale,’ Churchill wrote in August 1940, ‘I have explicit authority of Cabinet to assure you that we should then cut our losses in the Mediterranean and proceed to your aid, sacrificing every interest except only [the] defence position of this island on which all else depends.’25
In short, the Japanese would have to be charging up Bondi Beach before Britain would send a fleet to the Pacific. Churchill’s assurances were ‘militarily worthless’.26 The words ‘large scale’ and ‘except’ were heavy hints. If the point penetrated Menzies’ sharp, legal brain, it did not show in his actions. He deemed it perfectly safe to keep tens of thousands of Australian men in the Middle East. He held this line, in a steadily weakening form, until his ejection from office in August 1941.
In this light, Britain did not betray Australia. Churchill had offered a heavily qualified guarantee. His paramount loyalty, in their extreme peril, was to the British people. Churchill recognised that the ‘first duty of any Government is to its own country’.27 Menzies might have taken a leaf out of this remedial political text.
The United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff, in rejecting Australia’s representations for greater forces in the Pacific, stated their guiding principle: ‘It is vital to avoid being weak everywhere.’28 The war against Germany was exhausting British military resources. They had little to spare for the Far East. In 1941, British weakness ‘on all fronts’, made it ‘impossible to denude them any further to meet a possible [Japanese] threat’, said one British commander.29 Churchill had diverted a division of British troops to Singapore, in response to an Australian plea, thousands of whom perished.
Churchill knew, in the end, that Britain couldn’t save Singapore: ‘I do not see how anyone could expect Malaya to be defended once the Japanese obtained command of the sea and while we are fighting for our lives against Germany…’30While British circumstances had profoundly changed, Australians were locked in a dream world based on fading assurances from the past. The ‘steel walls of the British navy’31 proved rather more brittle than Menzies’ scrap iron.
Australians, in truth, were betrayed not by Britain so much as by their political and military leaders (with the notable exception of Curtin), whose appalling neglect of the most basic duty of government—national security—directly led to the crisis in the Owen Stanleys. And it is possibly true that the Australian people, in their wistful nostalgia and denial of the Japanese threat, betrayed themselves.*
One act of Churchill’s was unforgiveable, however, and it was directly linked to the battle for Australia. The British leader stubbornly resisted the return home of two divisions of Australian troops, and actually ordered their diversion to Burma while they were at sea, without informing the Australian Government. No doubt the loss of British soldiers in Singapore had affected his judgment.32 Yet no nation, least of all Britain, would have tolerated such grotesque interference in domestic security by a foreign power. The episode formed the crucible of a heroic struggle by Australia’s new prime minister, in a crisis not of his making, for the return home of the Second Australian Imperial Force—the very men who would soon relieve the militia in the Papuan mountains.