‘The only way that counts’: Australia and the world war
If you take an east-bound train on the Mass Transit Railway from downtown Hong Kong, the end of the line is Chai Wan terminus. You can catch a public light bus (number 16M) but it is just as quick to walk. You go out of the terminus, up Wan Tsui Road, turn right up Lin Shing Road, and after about ten minutes you come to Sai Wan War Cemetery. When it was built at the war’s end, you could look from the newly installed Cross of Sacrifice down the long, green, headstone-dotted lawn towards the sea. Today all you can see are high-rise apartment blocks housing Hong Kong’s millions. But like all Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries, Sai Wan is a beautiful, tranquil, desperately sad place. But Hong Kong? What has a cemetery in Hong Kong to do with Australia’s war?
In Plot Six, in grave A.2, lie the remains of Sergeant Albert James of the 2/19th Battalion, who had last seen his son, Vivian, when he left Sydney in 1941. Albert James is one of thirty-three Australians buried in Sai Wan. In the cruellest of fates, Sergeant James survived the Malayan and Singapore campaigns, captivity in Changi, forced labour on the Burma–Thailand Railway, the perilous voyage to Japan and the effects of starvation and sickness. He lived to be liberated. Then the Dakota taking him home crashed, and he was buried here, in a beautiful cemetery on a hillside in Hong Kong. Sergeant James, the War Graves Commission website gushes uncharacteristically, was the husband of Minora May James of Kogarah, New South Wales, and the father of ‘the famous television presenter, Clive James’.
Clive James’ life was changed by the events of 1942 as much as anyone’s. Albert last saw his eighteen-month-old son before his embarkation for Malaya in 1941. All his life, James has pondered the effects of his father’s death, and the war that brought it about. He returns to it repeatedly in his books and television programs. Even at his silliest – he went through a period of obsessive interest in Japanese game shows – James is picking away at the scab of memory. One day he aims to write a book pondering the war that changed his life. I hope he does.
Another of those prominent birds of passage (not émigrés and not exiles, because they come back every so often) is Barry Humphries. Clive James has argued that Humphries makes Australians ‘proud of their country in the only way that counts – by joining it to the world’.1 This is probably an unpopular judgement in modern Australia. Of course Australia is as good as the world’s best. We make wine as good as you will get in Paris (or better!). We are proud of ‘our’ athletes, singers, artists – yes, of course. And we are among the world’s best skiters.
This book has applied Clive James’ judgement to Australia’s conduct in and contribution to the Second World War. Australia’s military history traditionally, and increasingly, looks at wars from an Australian perspective. The question implicitly applied to almost all military history written in and about Australia in the past twenty years is, ‘Yes, but how did it affect us?’ As a result, the greatest conflict the world has ever seen, a war that cost the lives of about 50 million people, that saved millions more from brutal oppression, is reduced to interest in Australia’s particular part. In its ultimate form – fast becoming the orthodoxy in Australia – our involvement in battles that did not obviously contest direct Japanese operations towards Australia is regarded as unjustified. To understand how wrong this is, we need to go back to 3 September 1939.
‘An Australian decision’: rethinking Australia’s war
Except for the line about his melancholy duty, Menzies’ broadcast is otherwise pretty much forgotten. As he receded into history, tarred as the staunchest of monarchists (he famously revealed his feelings about the young Queen Elizabeth in the much-derided couplet ‘I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die’) the belief took root that Menzies had committed Australia to war as a kneejerk reaction to Britain’s declaration. Just before Menzies’ broadcast, Australians with shortwave wireless receivers able to pick up broadcasts from London had indeed heard Neville Chamberlain’s announcement that Britain was at war with Germany. Menzies’ address followed Chamberlain’s, of course, but it had been crafted over the preceding days. The familiar snatch from Menzies’ address has created the impression that, as in 1914, Australia had gone to war without question because of its membership of the British empire.
In fact, if you listen to the rest of Menzies’ seventeen-minute speech, a very different picture emerges. What he actually said was that over the preceding year the Australian Government had monitored the growing crisis in Europe, had observed Nazi Germany’s gradual encroachment on the territories of its neighbours, its aggressive denial of democratic values, and what today would be described as its breaches of human rights. The rest of his speech gave a history of the European crisis that had been building throughout the 1930s. He made clear that successive Australian Cabinets – his own had existed for only five months – had both pondered developments in Europe and had conveyed to Britain Australia’s view.
Even so, as Menzies made clear, if joining a war in defence of democracy and liberty against an aggressive totalitarian power were necessary, it was still regrettable. Menzies spoke to a nation that lived with the scars of the Great War. Many of those who heard him that Sunday evening remembered what that war had cost. Many veterans or widows were still in their forties – middle-aged by the standards of the 1930s but hardly elderly. Many of Menzies’ listeners in their sixties had lost sons or nephews. Sixty thousand Australians had died in the war to end all wars: on Gallipoli, in Sinai and Palestine and above all on the Western Front. Over 150 000 had been wounded, and many more damaged in mind. While prepared to do their duty – still a potent word to that generation – they faced up to it soberly rather than enthusiastically. The Age’s reporters noticed how the crowds on Melbourne’s streets were ‘strangely silent’. Commuters crowded around the newspaper’s office door and mobbed newsboys, so eager for papers that they forgot their change. In shop doorways, in tearooms and on railway platforms, ‘little groups of men – many of them obviously veterans of the last war – stood discussing the news quietly’.
Whose war was this? Many Australians today think of it as ‘England’s war’, not simply not Australia’s, but nothing to do with Australia: the usual phrase is ‘somebody else’s war’.2 Menzies did not agree. He appealed to principles that his listeners shared: ‘honest dealing, the peaceful adjustment of differences, the rights of independent peoples to live their own lives, the honouring of international obligations and promises’. He affirmed that ‘where Great Britain stands there stand the people of the entire British world’ – a world that Australians felt they belonged to, but which has since been eroding, especially after Singapore. It was, as the official historian, Paul Hasluck, wrote, ‘more than anything else an Australian decision.’ But Menzies’ appeal was not only to imperial loyalty, but also to liberal principles. These principles, which were embodied in statements such as the Atlantic Charter of 1941, remind us that the Second World War began as – and remained – a crusade for the values at the centre of Western political culture: political liberty and tolerance, freedom as we understand it.
The relationship between Australia and what the Allies fought for has increasingly been lost in early twenty-first-century Australia. As we approach the seventieth anniversary of the war’s outbreak, the Second World War against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy is increasingly being seen in Australia as a remote imperial trade war, one fought in (and concerning only) Europe, one remote from Australian interests. The Pacific War with Japan is increasingly being seen as the most important part of the war, though not because it entailed the oppression and then the liberation of millions of Asians, but because it briefly touched Australia’s shores in a ‘Battle for Australia’, because Australia seemed likely to face invasion. This selfish reinterpretation of the war, exaggerated to the point where it has been given a new name, is unjustified and unworthy of us. It separates us from the broader war, rather than connects us with it, in a sort of historical isolationism.
The irony of the internment of the Australia First movement’s leaders in 1942 is that they took more or less the same view of the war as some of the romantic isolationist nationalists who look at the war so unsympathetically today. Like the Australia Firsters of 1942, they question Australia’s ties with Britain, are sceptical about Australia’s need to get involved at all, and deprecate the need for Australians to risk their lives in fighting. They too regard the war as ‘somebody else’s’. These nationalists express scorn for Churchill and Roosevelt’s ‘Beat Hitler First’ strategy. It has become a shibboleth among Australian historians that the strategy was somehow unfair to Australia, because Australia’s leaders were supposedly not told of it and because it exposed Australia to a Japanese threat for longer than necessary. In fact, Curtin’s Advisory War Council was reminded in December 1941 that ‘We must not forget that Germany … is still the main enemy’.3 And, as Ed Drea noted, ‘the Germany First strategy did not mean Germany only.’4 Indeed, a substantial proportion of American military and especially naval power was dedicated to the Pacific theatre. John Edwards, in Curtin’s Gift, acknowledges that the Allies’ Germany First strategy ‘did not in fact slow the war against Japan by a day’.5
For Australia, the events of early 1942, and even more what they seemed to portend, would fracture that consensus with the broader Allied cause. The result has been that over the past decade or so especially, Australia has begun to think of the Second World War in ways that Robert Menzies, when he pondered what he should do on the journey from Colac, would never have dreamed possible. Australians have begun to think of the Second World War as being not, as Menzies said, about defence of ‘the peace of the world’, but about a supposed ‘Battle for Australia’.
That is not to say that had events gone differently Australia would never have faced an actual threat. Had the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway especially been lost, had Australian and American forces failed to regain the initiative in the Solomons and Papua, things might have gone differently. But despite the rich tradition of imagining and inventing invasion, history deals with what happened, not what might have happened. The fact is that there was a potential Japanese threat in 1942, a decision was made by Japan not to invade and no further opportunity presented itself. A ‘Battle for Australia’ did not happen.
It needs to be said very clearly and explicitly that in criticising the idea of a Battle for Australia I am in no way diminishing the sacrifice or achievements of those Australians who served and suffered, and especially those who died in the war years. As I have said repeatedly, those who risked and gave their lives for the Allied cause in 1942 deserve the highest honour.
But we need to be wary of engaging in an unseemly bidding war. It is doing no honour to the dead to say that they all died ‘defending Australia’ directly, or to imply that those who died directly in defence of Australia (in Darwin, for example) somehow acquire an additional lustre. Those who died over Berlin, or at Alamein or off Tobruk – in actions intimately connected with Allied victory but not remotely connected to the direct defence of Australia – are equally worthy of our regard. We also need to be mature enough to acknowledge that in the south-west Pacific many died in support of flawed plans (such as the defence of the Malay Barrier), in actions unrelated to the defence of Australia or from causes unrelated to battle. But that they died in support of a great cause makes their deaths equally worthy of remembrance.
‘This was the noble cause’: changing our minds about the war
So, was there a Battle for Australia? No, not in the literal meaning of the term. There was no actual ‘Battle for Australia’, not then. There is now, though. There is a battle over what Australians should think and believe about their part in the Second World War. We are waging a battle for the truth about the history of our nation.
But if we are not to recast our remembrance around a Battle for Australia and an invasion that did not happen, what should we remember? The example of former prisoner of war Don McLaren gives us a clue. Of the forty-two men in his 8th Division Salvage Unit, exactly half died as prisoners of war. Commenting on his published diary of his time on the Burma–Thailand Railway, Mates in Hell, he confessed that ‘hardly a night passes’ that he did not think of ‘those poor souls of Asian origin’ who died alongside prisoners of war labouring on the railway, and whose shallow graves he dug.6 Don McLaren, a product of the racist, Yellow-Peril-fearing old Australia, remembered the Asian romusha who suffered alongside him. That suggests a more realistic remembrance of this war, a war fought by Australians not so much for themselves, but for others.
With Anzac Day seemingly immovably anchored to Gallipoli and the Great War, there have been calls for a day to remember the dead of the Second World War. Various anniversaries are proposed – recently the RSL’s National Congress resolved to mark a Kokoda Day in November. The anniversary that most Battle for Australia protagonists seek to mark in the first week of September is in my view a fitting date. But they conceive of the event and the reason too narrowly. The present Battle for Australia commemoration is the first Wednesday in September to mark the anniversary of the end of the fight at Milne Bay. That was indeed a symbolic and significant action, when a small force of Australian Militia and AIF troops, supported by Australian air and naval forces and some Americans, defeated a Japanese attempt to establish a base in support of their designs on Port Moresby.
Coincidentally, though, this is also more or less the anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War for Australia, as well as the anniversary of its end. On 3 September 1939 Robert Menzies announced Australia’s entry to the war, and on 2 September 1945 Australia’s representative (Tom Blamey, the great survivor) signed Japan’s surrender document aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
I would argue that Australians ought to pause, to reflect and remember on 3 September each year. But let us do so in memory of all of those Australians who helped to fight Nazism and fascism in Europe and militarist aggression in Asia. Let us remember those who gave their lives for the freedom of the millions who actually were occupied and oppressed by Germany and Japan, and not in memory of a ‘battle’ that did not actually occur in the way some say. The sacrifices of all Australians in the Second World War helped to ensure that Australians inherited the society we cherish today. That seems to be a legacy of much greater significance and one worth remembering.
We should always remember that between 1939 and 1945 Australians mobilised to fight for values that we still hold dear today. In both Asia and in Europe, Australians made a clear contribution to Allied victory, to the defeat of oppression and to the restoration of the international rule of law. The conflict was global, and so was Australia’s response. That inspires a longer-lasting and more secure admiration of what Australia contributed than does an exaggeration of a perceived, but in the end empty, threat to Australia itself.