Chapter 13
World War I: International and Local Ruptures
In This Chapter
Preparing for global war — logistically and politically
Going off to war, and suffering tremendous casualties
Dealing with tensions and splits on the home front
Playing a part in the peace process
World War I (1914–18) marks Australia’s entry into the truly modern era, for better or for worse, as Britain, Russia, France and eventually the US were involved in a war against Germany, Turkey, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The ‘for better’ part is Australia stepping onto the global stage, as a key combatant on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918, and, after the war, as a player around the bargaining table at Versailles, where treaties were negotiated and a League of Nations was formulated. Australia also developed a new brand of hero — the Anzac digger — who first began to emerge during the doomed yet heroic Gallipoli campaign of 1915.
The ‘for worse’ part is the sheer mass of human loss. For a nation of fewer than five million to lose over 60,000 men killed and some 150,000 wounded was no small thing. On top of that were the acute social and religious divisions that opened up in Australia through the course of the war. The attempt to create a new ‘social laboratory’ in the new nation after Federation (refer to Chapter 12) was derailed as Australia was embroiled in a global fight to the death.
At the beginning of the war both sides of Australian politics gave enthusiastic endorsement of Britain, while many in the Australian public greeted the war as a chance to go out into the world on a big adventure; all Australian soldiers were volunteers.
In this chapter, I cover the major defeats and victories that comprise Australia’s war effort abroad during World War I, and some of its major players. I also cover the issues at home that divided the nation, causing splits in the fabric of political, social and religious life that would take decades to heal properly.
Gearing Up for Global War
Just prior to war being declared, both major parties declared their full allegiance to Britain and the empire, and spoke grandly about Australia sacrificing everything for the cause. Prime Minister Joseph Cook said, ‘All of our resources in Australia are . . . for the preservation and the security of the Empire’. On the same night, Andrew Fisher, the Labor opposition leader, said that ‘Australians will stand beside her own to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling’.
This might seem like not much more than typical, over-the-top politician’s words. Certainly most of the men volunteering to be soldiers and the women volunteering to be nurses didn’t think much about the possibility of ‘last man and last shilling’ — they were thinking more about the chance to see the world and have some excitement. But, privately, the party leaders had some sense of what everyone was getting themselves into. Cook told his cabinet, ‘If Armageddon is to come, you and I shall be in it’.
The outbreak of war, then, was not completely unexpected, and the previous Labor Government, after being given the ‘heads-up’ from Britain, had built on Alfred Deakin’s previous efforts to build up Australia’s forces. Labor then used this preparation to present itself as the best party to lead the nation during the uncertain war times.
Building up Australian forces
Andrew Fisher, leader of the Labor Opposition at the outbreak of World War I, had been Australia’s prime minister from 1910 to 1913 (as well as from 1908 to 1909). Like Cook, Fisher also knew that Australia was getting into something serious.
As prime minister in 1911, Fisher attended an Imperial Conference in London where for the first time ever the British shared with the various dominions — New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Australia — some of the political secrets about their alliances with and commitments to countries in Europe. The representatives of the dominions were also given some idea of the tensions that threatened to boil over.
In other words, Fisher and the other prime ministers were told something along the lines of, ‘Get ready for war. If it comes, it’s going to be a big one’. The words obviously sank in, because by 1913 Labor was spending one-third of Australia’s revenue on defence preparations, and compulsory military training was in place for Australian youths. In 1911 the Royal Australian Navy was formed.
Choosing the best party to lead the wartime government
The United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. On 5 September 1914, Australians went to the polls to decide who would lead them in this new climate of war.
After the war announcement, Fisher’s deputy leader, William (Billy) Hughes, spent the weekend completely re-writing Labor’s election manifesto. He put together a case for presenting Labor as the best choice for an Australia at war — after all, it was Labor who had laid so much of the groundwork to ensure Australia was on a good war footing, through establishing compulsory military training and throwing its energy into developing an Australian navy.
Hughes’s manifesto worked. Just over a month later, Labor won a stunning election victory, taking not only 42 of the 75 seats in the House of Representatives but an overwhelming 31 of 36 Senate seats as well.
Labor had established themselves as the ‘natural’ party of responsible national government — the party people turn to in times of crisis. Labor pitched itself as the best party to go to war with, and won comprehensively. Just three years later, the Labor party would be split and the 1917 election would give them a defeat even more stunning than their 1914 victory. (See the section ‘When Billy goes rogue — aftermath of the Labor split’ later in this chapter for more on this split and its effects.)
Why get involved?
World War I started when war was declared between European powers on the other side of the world. Why did Australia get involved? Reasons include the following:
Realpolitik. Practically all Australia’s trade was with Britain, and Australia’s defence and regional security depended entirely on the British, who at the time were the dominant global superpower. If Britain’s power and wealth were irretrievably broken after losing this war, then Australia would be a sitting duck. Australia would inevitably come under the economic and, possibly, military domination of Germany, and could lose any real capacity to decide the future of the country.
Australians felt British. For most Australians, Australia and Britain weren’t mutually exclusive categories. Instead, they existed as part of a continuum. The vast majority of Australians felt strongly that the Australian character was made up of intrinsically British attributes and ways of life that had been transplanted to a new environment.
Australia wanted to prove themselves to Britain. Many Australians felt anxiety about their past — the lingering sense that they weren’t good enough. Firstly, a nation that begins with convict settlers is going to have to deal with a fair sense of stigma. Secondly, the status of being a colonial outpost for 120 years helped cultivate a sense of being second-best. To be a colonial was to feel, in some inescapable way, second-rate. Going off and fighting well in a big war was a way of proving that things hadn’t gone that bad in Britain’s colonial outpost.
Australia at War
Australia’s involvement in World War I (from August 1914 to November 1918) resulted in 61,720 Australian combatants being killed, and over 150,000 wounded. Proportionate to its population, Australia had one of the highest rates of losses (with deaths equalling 1.2 per cent of the population, a rate second only to that of New Zealand). Overall, 416,809 served in the military with 331,781 serving overseas.
Australians’ initial enthusiasm for war as a big adventure disappeared as the number of deaths rose, with the Australian forces suffering huge losses — battling the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, and getting bogged down in trenches along Europe’s Western Front in 1916 and 1917.
However, after repelling a massive German offensive in early 1918, news of some tremendous victories starting coming through from the Western Front, with Australian soldiers, under the leadership of General John Monash, playing a prominent part.
Through it all, Australian fighters were able to build a reputation for themselves as tough, reliable and unyielding, showing themselves to be as good as — if not better than — their British counterparts. (For a detailed coverage of Australia’s involvement in World War I, and other conflicts, see Australia’s Military History For Dummies, Wiley Australia Publishing.)
Proving ourselves to the world, part I: Gallipoli
In April 1915, Australian soldiers landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, as part of a combined force of Australian, New Zealand, British and French soldiers. The plan was to take the peninsula from the Turkish army in an attempt to secure a sea route for the British ally, Russia. The British thought that if they found a good way through to supply the Russians, then they could also secure a way to attack Germany from the south-east. Possibly a good idea in theory, it went wrong from the start. The Turkish were better prepared than anyone expected, the wrong beaches and coves were landed on, and the peninsula proved impossible to take.
On landing, the British-allied troops were able to secure a toehold on the peninsula. Despite a number of offensives over the next few months, this toehold was never really expanded.
The Anzac area was just over 11 kilometres long at its furthest point, and under 2 kilometres wide. The surrounding hills and ridges were occupied by Turks. By November 1915, 41,000 men were crowded into the Anzac area.
Fighting at Gallipoli was unlike subsequent fighting on the Western Front in two ways:
1. Very little heavy artillery was used.
2. None of the British-allied troops could escape from danger. The front-line was the entire area. Officers and administrators who were planning the campaign were also exposed to enemy gunfire.
In December 1915, the campaign was abandoned and the troops evacuated.
Although the Gallipoli campaign was a disaster, Australia’s troops performed admirably. Their conduct during the gruelling campaign became part of what would later be known as the Anzac spirit, as Australian diggers (originally just Australian soldiers, but now a term used to cover sailors and airmen as well) were seen to embody attributes such as mateship, courage and endurance. The day of landing — 25 April 1915 — became known as Anzac Day, the annual day of commemoration of Australia’s (and New Zealand’s) diggers.
Proving ourselves to the world, part II: The Western Front
After Gallipoli, the majority of Australian soldiers (the AIF) were shifted to the Western Front in France and Belgium to fight against the German Army. This was where the real confrontation was — whoever prevailed on the Western Front would win the war.
On reaching the front, Australian forces suffered further losses. Casualties reached a peak in September to November 1917 when, after 15 weeks of fighting in an offensive at the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele), Australian losses totalled 38,000, helping to make 1917 the worst year in Australia’s history for wartime losses.
Despite the tremendous sacrifice, however, the actions of Australian forces on the Western Front helped give definitive shape to the newly forming ‘Anzac Legend’. While Gallipoli was a site of valiant failure, the Australian Corps (formed from the AIF in 1918) became one of the elite shock troops that were so central to achieving victory in 1918.
For the Australian forces, the following Western Front battles were key:
Fromelles: 19 July 1916. The 5th Division of the AIF lost 5,533 men in 27 hours of fighting alongside the 61st Division of Britain, trying to hold down German reserves to stop them transferring to the battle then raging on the Somme.
Before the battle started, Australian brigadier General Harold Elliott asked a British Staff Officer how he thought the attack would go. The officer replied, ‘If you put it to me like that, Sir, I must answer you in the same way, as man to man. It is going to be a bloody holocaust’. He wasn’t far wrong.
Pozières: July, August, September 1916. In the summer of 1916, 23,000 men spent seven weeks trying to push through the German line on the Somme front. When the battle was over the village, fields, hedges and crops of Pozières were completely destroyed and 13,000 Australian soldiers had died. Anzac and British troops eventually took the village of Pozières, although at great cost. The German line remained unbroken.
Bullecourt: April, May 1917. Australian forces were used in an attack on a strongly defended part of the German Hindenburg Line (an extensive line of fortifications that Germany had built to protect its troops from counterattack and invasion). A new technological innovation — tanks, or ‘land battleships’ — was supposed to protect the infantry by moving ahead, crushing the lines of barbed wire and crossing the enemy trench lines. But the newly developed tank technology faltered, and none of the tanks managed to reach the wire before the troops did. Moreover their steel was too thin to withstand artillery bombs. The Australian 4th Division suffered 2,339 casualties from 3,000 men. In a German counterattack to capture more territory, a force of 4,000 Australians held off 16,000.
Messines Ridge: 11 June 1917. By 1917, British military strategy seemed to become, ‘If we can’t fight through the German front-line, perhaps we can blow it up’. Nineteen massive mines were placed beneath the Messines-Wytschaete ridge (which was part of the heavily fortified German line), after months of tunnelling and preparation. As part of this strategy, one hill, (prosaically called ‘Hill 60’) that lay directly beneath the German fortified line was blown up by the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company. The explosion was so loud it could be heard across the English Channel and in it 10,000 Germans were killed instantly or buried alive. The battle that followed the huge explosion featured John Monash’s 3rd Division following the Australian general’s highly meticulous plan, and emerging highly successful (see the following section for more on Monash).
Passchendaele: August to October 1917. During the northern autumn of 1917, Australian forces were used as part of a three-month attempt to bring victory using the British commander’s ‘one more push’ philosophy. By the end of the three futile months, British and colonial dead were between 62,000 and 66,000, with many men having drowned in the mud as the rain turned relentless.
For Australians back home, Passchendaele was the low point of World War I. The great losses on the field of battle meant that a second conscription referendum was called, this one proving to be even more divisive than the last. (See the section ‘Conscription controversy’ later in this chapter for more details on the dire home front situation.)
The German March Offensive. On 21 March 1918, the Germans began a large-scale offensive, using 42 new divisions — over half a million men — which they’d transferred from the Eastern Front (Russia having made peace with Germany after their Communist Revolution late in 1917). After nine days the Germans had regained all the ground they’d previously lost on the Somme River, and taken 90,000 prisoners. They came within 50 miles of Paris before being halted, with Australian troops being instrumental in halting the advance at the key strategic town of Amiens.
Villers-Bretonneux: April 1918. German troops tried to take Amiens at the start of April, sending in 60,000 men against half the number of Allied defenders. British and Australian troops were called in. At the strategically crucial Villers-Bretonneux, Australian troops got stuck into the Germans with some of the fiercest bayoneting of the war. British tanks drove back the enemy as Australian troops encircled the town in a pincer movement.
General John Monash engineers some victory
The Australian Corps was formed at the beginning of 1918 and placed under General Sir John Monash’s command. This meant that for the last year of the war, Australian soldiers fought as an entirely Australian force, just as they were reaching peak performance capacity.
Some famous victories that occurred under Monash’s command in 1918 include
Hamel: 4 July
Amiens: 8 August
Mont St Quentin and Peronne: 31 August and 1 September
Breaking the Hindenburg Line: 15 September
Battling for Hamel
The battle for Hamel was meticulously planned and took 93 minutes, with tanks under the control of infantry commanders, a creeping artillery barrage, air support of both fighters and bombers, and ammunition being air-dropped by parachute to machine-gun battalions for the first time in history.
Although small in scale, the battle was a sophisticated set-piece, featuring all the modern forms of warfare that had been developed in the previous four years of fighting. The complete battle plan was afterwards published by the British High Command staff as an example of how to do a battle right.
Fighting for Amiens
The battle for Amiens was part of a large-scale attack across a whole series of points along the front that succeeded in seizing a large chunk of German front-line and swinging the momentum decisively in the Allies’ favour. German war commander Ludendorff later called this the ‘black day’ after which Germany’s hopes of winning the war were broken.
The Australian Corps, under Monash’s command, were used as one of the spearheads of attack. The style of the battle was new, using
Aircraft for reconnaissance and ground attack
Artillery in counter-barrage (protecting infantry assaults from enemy gunfire)
Tanks to protect infantry and create paths through wire
Changing tactics at Mont St Quentin
After the great Amiens victory, however, new challenges emerged. The nature of the fighting changed again as the previously static trench-line stalemate was broken. General Monash’s own personal character (meticulous to the point of obsessive, highly proficient at creatively abstract, organised thought) and the whole of his Western Front experience throughout 1917 had combined to make him one of, if not the, best exponent of the classic ‘set-piece battle’. The taking of territory through adhering rigorously to strictly limited objectives, the classic ‘bite and hold’ of territory, was Monash’s forte.
But the set-piece battle wouldn’t win the war. As the Allied forces went on the offensive, fighting — and the thinking which shaped it — was going to be far more fluid and open than it had been for the whole Western Front campaign. This was the challenge of the attack on Mont St Quentin on 31 August 1918. Here there wasn’t enough time to arrange ‘creeping barrages’ of precise artillery deployment, and Monash changed tack. Vigorous attacks of infantry were carried out, with Monash deciding ‘Casualties no longer matter’. At Peronne, the next day, the Somme line was turned.
Holding it together long enough to make the victory march
By the late summer of 1918, the Australian Corps had been fighting continually for months. Desertion rates were higher than any other corps on the front. Moreover, the strain was beginning to show on Monash himself. His closest assistant — Thomas Blamey — watched as Monash pushed himself and his corps to the edge.
Blamey wrote afterwards that Monash, along with his men, ‘suffered severely from the strain of these last few months. He became very thin, the skin hung loosely on his face. His characteristic attitude was one of deep thought. With his head carried slightly forward, he would ride in his car for long periods in silence’. Monash was working his troops and himself to the extreme limits of their endurance.
Back in London, Prime Minister Hughes (who had replaced Fisher in 1915), like the rest of the Imperial War Cabinet, was still assuming that the war would extend into 1919, and possibly even 1920. Hughes wanted to conserve the Australians for these imagined final battles. Monash, who like other front-line generals was beginning to sense just how hopeless the Germans’ situation was, felt that no matter how exhausted and burnt out they may feel, the Australians ‘should be called upon to yield up the last particle of effort of which they were capable’.
The victories keep coming, but fatigue was chronic and the casualty rate was high. The storming of Mont St Quentin and the taking of Peronne, which started on 31 August (see preceding section), went for 60-odd hours but Monash kept pushing, by his own admission, quite ruthlessly. Prime Minister Hughes wanted to pull the Australian Corps out, but Monash wanted to keep going — by this stage he could almost smell victory.
Making it to the final battle: The attack on the Hindenburg Line
In September and October of 1918, the main focus of the British offensive was to break the German Hindenburg Line. To do this, they would use the Fourth Army, of which the Australian Corps would be the vanguard. This constituted Monash’s biggest project, and Australia’s greatest responsibility, for the whole war.
Last-minute changes to orders due to broader strategic concerns meant that Monash was unable to plan the assault in the usual meticulous, ‘control everything, leave nothing to chance’ way that he favoured. During the battle, an exhausted Monash refused to believe reports that the plan wasn’t working. Eventually victory was won, as Australian forces captured the town of Montbrehain on 5 October, but at cost, and at loss.
In all, from their initial attack on Amiens on 8 August to their final battle of World War I in early October, Australian forces under Monash had taken 60 kilometres of crucial territory. This advance contributed significantly to the Allied victory, as well as cementing the ideal of the Anzac digger and confirming Monash’s skill as a commander.
Home Front Hassles
While Australia was struggling and proving itself on the battlefields of Europe, cracks and strains were opening up on the home front. In the course of the war, fractures in Australian society began to show: The general tensions of getting the economy on a war footing, the break-up of the previous multiethnic consensus that had existed between Irish, English and Scottish Australians, the controversies over the government’s attempt to introduce conscription, and the eventual Labor party split.
Getting on the war footing
Over the course of the war, and as the financial cost of the war effort increased, the Australian Government passed a series of new laws and undertook measures that resulted in the government gaining more power and control.
Introducing the six o’clock swill
In 1915 pubs and hotels began to be closed from six o’clock in the evening as part of a war austerity measure. The change in law was partly a response to popular feeling that pastimes and amusements (such as sport, cinema, theatre, circuses and music halls) should be curtailed while so many Australians were fighting overseas, and partly a response to a long-running temperance movement, which had been campaigning since the mid-19th century for the elimination of alcohol from public life.
The early closing laws and restrictions on buying alcohol from other sources resulted in the very opposite of what temperance campaigners had been hoping to bring about. Getting as ferociously drunk as you possibly could within a short period of time soon became embedded in the fabric of Australian culture as the ‘six o’clock swill’ (see accompanying figure).
Drinkers, knocking off work at 5 pm, rushed to pubs and proceeded to drink as much alcohol as possible in the next 60 minutes. At 6 pm, drunk as they could get, they wandered off home. This became part of the fabric of Australian life until the 1950s and 1960s, when early closing legislation was finally, thankfully, repealed.
On 13 September 1915, a war income-tax bill, giving the federal government power to levy tax on incomes for the first time, was introduced and tax became payable on annual incomes exceeding £156. In July 1917, the Commonwealth Government introduced a war profits tax, whereby companies’ profits were compared to prewar profits and taxed at a substantially increased rate if profits had increased during the war. This was to ensure the wealthy — and those profiting from the war — made an adequate contribution to the war effort.
But war also made good business — the demand for Australian products such as wool, wheat and other raw commodities, escalated significantly. Over April, May and June 1916, the newly formed Australian Wheat Board sold nearly 1 million tonnes of wheat to the British. This guaranteed market and a good price for their wheat was great for farmers.
Frustrated at the lack of shipping autonomy, Hughes purchased on behalf of the Commonwealth 15 steamers at £2 million. These vessels became the Commonwealth Shipping Line.
Irish troubles
For the majority of colonial arrivals, the most strange and confronting thing wasn’t something exotic like bushfires or Indigenous Australians (the majority of immigrants, living and working in the main colonial cities, didn’t see much of either), but the new fact of having an Irish family as neighbours, or an Englishman running your local pub. Races with centuries of discord, conflict and enmity were confronted with each other in a way that they never had in the United Kingdom. And, before the outbreak of World War I, they mostly got along fine.
At the beginning of the war, Irish Australians were as enthused as anyone else. But the Easter Uprising in Dublin, Ireland, in April 1916, and the harsh British crackdown that followed, significantly changed that. For Australia the change was far-reaching, as one of the crucial components in maintaining the pre-war national harmony, Irish Catholic Australians, now began to see themselves, and be seen, as in some intrinsic way distinct from and alien to the British Australian majority. Sectarian animosity replaced the mutual tolerance story that had been pre-war British Australia, and the rift would take decades to heal.
19th-century multiculturalism
In the colonies, the term ‘British’ had always been a work in progress, combining as it did previously hostile elements. Throughout the 19th century the success of Irish settlers in colonial society became the first great ‘multicultural’ success story in Australia. In Australia, traditional ethnic and religious enemies — English, Scottish, Irish, Catholic and Protestant — came into contact with each other and had to learn how to cohabit.
Throughout the 19th century, Australia had featured a significant Irish Catholic minority. Unlike in Britain and the US, Irish Catholics in Australia weren’t centred in slums and ghettoes in big cities, nor were they limited to menial low-paid work. While still managing to fill more than their fair quota of those in jail (and those in the police force), the Irish spread throughout colonial society — not just geographically, but occupationally and socially.
While most Irish immigrants arrived in Australia as labourers, unskilled workers or servants, in the colonies they managed to work their way up the socio-economic ladder. Irish Catholic lawyers, journalists, premiers, graziers and pastoralists, pub owners, merchants, wholesale traders, importers — every occupation has its representatives from Ireland.
As Irish immigrants were making themselves successful on the other side of the world, rumblings came from people within Australian-based Irish clubs who wanted Ireland to become like the colonies — to be self-governing but within the British Empire — and achieve ‘Home Rule’. Despite huffing and puffing between fringe groups and extremist sections on either side of the traditional Irish Catholic/Anglo Protestant divide, the majority of Irish immigrants and their children integrated themselves into colonial society with remarkable success.
Old tensions boil over
On 24 April 1916, a rebellion broke out in Dublin against British rule, and declared itself allied with Germany. The rebellion had little public or popular support, was pushed by extremists and was quickly put down. In Australia, the Irish clubs all condemned the uprising as likely to hamper the realisation of ‘Home Rule’.
But the British crackdown in Dublin was brutal. The ringleaders were executed without a public trial. Irish opinion was outraged and swung in behind these new ‘martyrs’ to the Irish cause. Over the next decade, a civil war was fought in Ireland before it became a self-governing dominion.
In Australia, pledging loyalty to the British Empire as well as loyalty to Ireland became contradictory. During a war being fought in Australia’s self-interest, but under the banner of Empire solidarity, this became a big problem.
The previously unified opinion on how to conduct the war split badly. An ethnic and a sectarian divide opened up between elements that had managed to previously remain integrated. After the Labor split of 1916 (see following section), the Labor Party became closely identified with Irish Catholic people, and partly as a consequence of this found itself sidelined from power because many previously loyal voters now viewed it with suspicion.
After the war this continued. In November 1919, a rally was held in Melbourne following the Australasian Irish race convention with Labor politician Joseph Ryan in the chair. This convention was catastrophic for Labor’s electoral chances at the federal election held in December. Prime Minister and now ex-Labor man Billy Hughes used it to damage the Labor party, linking the ALP with the Irish cause, and accusing it of disloyalty to Britain and Empire. In November 1920, Hugh Mahon, a federal MP for Labor, addressed a large Irish demonstration in Melbourne over the banning of Archbishop Mannix from Ireland by the British government. His description of ‘this bloody and accursed Empire’ led Hughes to move that Mahon should be expelled from Parliament. The motion was carried.
Conscription controversy
At the start of the war Australia was, on the face of it, a country quite likely to bring in conscription (compulsory military service). In the years previous the new Commonwealth Government had introduced compulsory military training for youths and young men. Labor was at the forefront of this training, seeing it as an integral part of the life of the democratic nation. The basic idea was that citizens, who all lived equally in the nation, must all be prepared to fight to defend it. But everyone assumed that the kind of defending the citizen patriots would have to do would be local — it didn’t occur to many people that fighting for Australia’s future was going to take place in trenches in France. In the first years of the war, people from all over Australia rushed to enlist. However, this initial enthusiasm started to disappear as the number of deaths rose, despite numerous recruitment campaigns (see Figure 13-1).
Over the course of the war, Australia held two referendums over whether conscription should be introduced. Both were defeated — by the narrowest of margins — but in the process the Labor Party would be shattered.
Figure 13-1: A 1915 recruitment poster.
Asking the nation once . . .
In August 1916, Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes returned from Britain, convinced that conscription should be introduced to ensure reinforcements for the AIF. He realised that a national referendum would be needed to get around resistance from his own party. After a four-day caucus (internal party) debate, Hughes got enough votes to take conscription to a referendum if the required enlistment numbers weren’t reached in the next month. Enlistment numbers weren’t reached and a referendum was on.
As the referendum was being proposed, many in the labour movement began to describe the war as a feud between rival capitalist bosses using working-class soldiers as fodder. And Labor unions were already annoyed with Labor politicians for not doing enough to legislate all aspects of the party’s program when they got into power. As the returned soldiers leagues publicly declared their approval of conscription, the ALP’s deputy leader, Frank Tudor, resigned in protest. In the end, Hughes needed votes from opposition members to get the referendum measure passed in parliament.
On 28 October 1916, a majority of voters decided against conscription, but by the tiniest of majorities — 1,160,033 to 1,087,557. Hughes was still not convinced, however, and a month later, the federal Labor party split. Hughes led 23 supporters out of a caucus meeting, going on to form his own National Labor Party, which managed to retain office with Liberal support. In the May 1917 election, Hughes’ coalition won a landslide victory, taking 53 seats in the House of Representatives compared to Labor’s 22.
At the same time as the referendum was being held, further tensions began to emerge, as well as weariness with war and the way it was being allowed to affect life in Australia and dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Hughes.
In May 1917, the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne died and was replaced by his deputy, Daniel Mannix, who was Irish, outspoken, eloquent and controversial. He voiced sympathy for Ireland’s resurgent demands for home rule, then became one of Hughes’s most vocal opponents on conscription.
Between August and October 1917, one of the most serious and widespread general strikes in Australian history crippled the country. Prices had escalated through the war, exceeding any concurrent wage rises, which made the cost of living a problem for many. This was a big change in a country that just a few years previously had boasted of having the highest standard of living anywhere in the British Empire.
Beginning with railway and tramway employees in NSW, the strike quickly spread to Victoria and became a general strike, as waterside workers, miners and unions in various essential industries joined. The strikes ended up involving 14 per cent of the workforce and 95,000 workers. Strikebreakers were used in the dispute, which served to deepen antagonistic feelings in Australian society.
Asking the nation twice . . .
In September and October of 1917, Australian losses on the Western Front became even more severe, and Hughes called for another referendum on conscription. Incredibly, this campaign was even more divisive than the first one. Returned soldiers violently broke up ‘No’ meetings, while ‘antis’ heckled patriotic women’s meetings.
Anti-conscription campaigners said that conscription was a plot to flood the country with cheap, coloured labour once all the Australian workers were safely conscripted into the army and sent overseas. Pro-conscription advocates said the burden had to be shared by everyone and anyone who tried to get out of it was a coward and a traitor.
Mannix became a lightning rod for opponents of the referendum, arguing Australia should be put first and the Empire second. Those against him said there was no difference: Australia’s interest and the Empire’s interest were the same. If the war was lost and the Empire fell, then Australia would be open to invasion or at the very least political and economic control by a foreign power.
On 23 December 1917, a second conscription referendum was defeated, again by narrow majority. This time the No vote defeated the Yes vote by 149,795 votes — still incredibly close, but double the majority of the first referendum on conscription.
When Billy goes rogue — aftermath of the Labor split
Two weeks after the first conscription referendum (on 28 October 1916 — see preceding section), Billy Hughes led most of the Labor ministers out of the Labor Party (just as they were deciding to expel him anyway). Hughes formed a ‘National Labor Party’ and struck up an alliance with the Liberal opposition. Although not much of a fan of the idea of multi-party ‘fusion’ Hughes desperately needed a party’s organisation and numbers to keep government, and it worked. In the 1917 election, Hughes campaigned on a ‘Win the War’ platform and an overwhelming majority of voters, many of whom had recently rejected Hughes’ conscription campaign at referendum, put Hughes’s Nationalist Party into government.
While Labor rose to prominence and then power by presenting itself as the party that was best-placed to continue the radical social experiment that was Australia (refer to Chapter 12), Labor politicians made themselves electorally successful by arguing their credentials as the party of Australia, not simply the working class. They were so good at this that the non-Labor parties, both the protectionist progressive Liberals led by Alfred Deakin and the free-trade conservatives, were left behind in the national debate, and soon merged into one non-Labor party (refer to Chapter 12 for more on this).
Labor’s great success fractured violently in the course of World War I. The two conscription referendums tore a hole out of Labor. The great irony was that although Labor was successful in campaigning against conscription (and against most of the country’s newspapers, moneyed elite, politicians and religious ministers), it cost Labor party unity, and cast a great doubt in the eyes of most voters as to the party’s fitness to govern and ability to help ‘our boys’ who were already overseas fighting.
Then there was the Irish thing. Part of the pre-split success of the Labor Party grew out of its ability to keep ethnic and religious tensions at a relatively low level, as was the case in Australian society at large. Many Irish and Irish-Australians became active in the emergent Labor Party at the start of the 20th century, but the party was a broad enough church to never let this one component become overwhelmingly dominant. While many workers were Irish Catholic, the Labor movement was also dominated by Scottish and English 1880s migrants. They came from a more industrially developed society than either Australia or Ireland, where the workers versus bosses conflicts of factories dominated the economic landscape. They were more experienced trade unionists and political organisers as a consequence.
The fusion of the Labor Party worked incredibly successfully until the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916 (refer to the section ‘Irish troubles’ earlier in this chapter). Labor in power was pragmatic, striking deals and pursuing policies that would prove popular with a majority of voters and get it re-elected. This approach had worked well in the prewar period but for many ‘true believers’ in the Labor cause, with backgrounds in the trade union movement, this seemed like betrayal. When conscription became an issue, at last there was a chance to get rid of those politicians who had already been suspected as being too pragmatic for Labor’s own good.
When Billy Hughes led fellow Labor parliamentarians out of the Labor government and the Labor Party in 1916, he was in reality leading the non-Irish Catholic component out of the party. What was left was a far more strongly Irish-specific body, at the same time as it was becoming more socialist. And because some of their wilder members subsequently made speeches against the British Empire, and in support of Sinn Fein (the Irish political party that provided a focus for Irish nationalism), the party became seen to be even more suspect.
Moving the Pieces around the Global Table: Australia at Versailles
In November 1918, Allied forces signed an armistice with Germany and a ceasefire was declared. In January the following year, global powers gathered in Versailles, just outside of Paris, to determine the terms of the peace. Largely based on the number of war dead he claimed to be representing, Australian prime minister Billy Hughes managed to wrangle a seat at the table — the first time Australia had represented itself at an international conference outside of Imperial meetings.
But Hughes didn’t stop there — after gaining a spot on the international diplomatic stage, he played hardball. He continued to voice the idea that Australia’s proportionately high rate of losses during the war entitled it to have its demands heeded.
One of Hughes’s demands was that Australia be granted control of German New Guinea (previously a German protectorate, and now known as Papua New Guinea). This was in direct conflict with the view of the US president, Woodrow Wilson, who was against the idea of annexation being part of the peace accord. However, when Wilson asked Hughes whether Australia, as a tiny nation on the other side of the world, intended to place itself in opposition to the wishes of most of the civilised world, Hughes famously replied, ‘That’s about the size of it, Mr President’.
At the conference, Hughes secured mandate control over German New Guinea and other islands south of the equator. Although he estimated the total cost of the war to Australia to be much more, Hughes was granted £100 million in reparations. By the time payment was ceased in 1932, Australia had received £5.5 million in reparations from Germany.
The League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations) was also established at the conference and Australia was a founding member, with this being the first political treaty signed by Australian officials. Continuing to play hardball, Hughes prevented Japan from inserting a racial equality clause in the covenant of the League of Nations, as he feared this would put at risk Australia’s White Australia policy.
Hughes returned to a hero’s welcome, hailed as the ‘little digger’ who had stood up to the world powers to get Australia’s way.
On 13 December 1919, Hughes and his Nationalist Party returned to power, although they needed the support of 11 members from a new political force: A ‘Country’ party, representing the interests of rural voters in the Commonwealth.