Curtin’s narrow return in the seat of Fremantle at the September 1940 election left him burdened with all the worries of the Labor leadership from which he had seemed so anxious to escape. Indeed, the result of the election only increased the pressures on Curtin. With a tightly balanced parliament, in which the Menzies Government now relied upon the support of two independent MPs, the calls for the Labor Party to join a national government became more shrill. While Curtin remained adamantly opposed to such a course, there were Labor MPs prepared to embrace it. Foremost among them was the newly elected member, Dr H.V. Evatt, who had resigned his position on the High Court and was anxious to exercise political power. He even had hopes of himself leading such a national government.
Evatt was a scholarship boy who had been a prize-winning student at university. Like Curtin, his father had been a publican who was stricken with a chronic illness a year before Evatt was born. His father died when Evatt was just 7 years old, with his mother shifting the family to Sydney four years later where they lived in relatively impoverished circumstances. However, she was sufficiently secure, and ambitious for her son, to forgo his potential wages and have him attend Fort Street High School and then Sydney University. Like Curtin’s mother, she was a devout churchgoer, albeit an Anglican, and had an ‘overbearing, demanding family demeanour’. This fuelled a fiery ambition in her son that would prove to be unquenchable. It may also have been fuelled to some extent by a need to compensate for the astigmatism that required him to wear glasses and which caused him to be rejected three times by the army during the First World War. When his two brothers were killed in the fighting, Evatt was burdened with a lifelong sense of guilt and a conviction that he lacked physical courage.1
Evatt emerged from Sydney University driven to attain political office, his only doubt being which political party would get him there first.2 In the event, he threw in his lot with the Labor Party and quickly rose through its ranks to become a State Labor MP by 1925 and a High Court judge five years later at the age of just 36 years. It was a meteoric rise by any measure but even that failed to satisfy him. From his position on the High Court, he attempted to have Menzies appoint him as the first Australian Minister to Washington and, when that was not successful, sounded out the possibility of leaving the court to lead an all-party government. The follies to which his ambition could drive him were seen in 1938 when, after a three-month stay in the United States, he had the temerity to write to President Roosevelt advising him as to who should fill a vacancy on the US Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the letter caused some consternation in Washington, with Roosevelt finally sending Evatt a non-committal reply.3 Now the mercurial figure was alongside Curtin on Labor’s frontbench. The dissident Labor MP, Maurice Blackburn, predicted that Evatt would ‘oust Curtin before long – and good luck to him’.4 It is a testament to Curtin’s political skills that he not only survived Evatt’s attempts to undermine him but he later harnessed Evatt’s energy and abilities, to the considerable benefit of Australia.
The Labor gains at the 1940 election should have secured Curtin’s political position, consolidating as it did the growing support for the Labor Party under Curtin’s leadership. But the election also weakened his hold on the leadership, with the Fremantle result suggesting that his personal popularity could not be guaranteed even in his own electorate, while the accession of new MPs brought possible alternative leaders into the House. Apart from Evatt, the election also saw the return of Ben Chifley and the election of Arthur Calwell. With the possible exception of Chifley, these men were hungry for political power now that Menzies had been wounded at the polls. They were dismayed when Curtin refused to countenance such activities.
The Canberra journalist and Labor MP Allan Fraser later remarked that Curtin ‘really believed that Menzies was a far better war leader for the Australian people’ and ‘was completely distrustful of his own ability to be a successful Prime Minister’.5 His frequent bouts of stress-related illness would have confirmed the impression of a man ‘distrustful of his own ability’. However, as Don Rodgers pointed out, Curtin ‘had a keen sense of humour, and enjoyed telling stories against himself’. One story involved a confession of his feelings of inadequacy, with Curtin telling how
as a union secretary, then as a journalist and then Leader of the Opposition he would go into the office of some great man and see a battery of telephones and pushbuttons. It had all impressed him and he wonder[ed] if one day, he would reach that eminence.
‘Then I became PM,’ he would say, ‘and now I press a button to find out what I have to do next.’ 6
Curtin clearly was less circumspect than most in confessing to feelings of self-doubt and insecurity, but such feelings were more than balanced by a sense of his own destiny, which drove him onwards, together with the knowledge that his oratorical abilities and leadership skills had few equals in the parliament.
It was not timidity that prevented Curtin from supporting his restless colleagues in a move against Menzies. After all, Menzies had won the election, however narrowly, and deserved a chance to exercise that mandate. Moreover, Curtin would have been keenly aware that a Labor government would be in an even worse position than Scullin had experienced in 1929. Not only would it have been faced with a hostile Senate, as Scullin had been, but it would have been reliant on the uncertain support of those two independent, but conservative, MPs who were propping up Menzies. It would have been power without purpose, with little chance of implementing the Labor platform. Far better to let the wounded Menzies administration run its course in the expectation that Labor would achieve a mandate in its own right at a subsequent election. Curtin was determined above all that the labour movement should not be shattered by the crisis of the war as it had been by the depression.
Experience had made him somewhat cynical about the labour movement to which he had devoted his life, and the parliamentary wing that he now led. As he confided to Lloyd Ross,
Labour’s politics in Australia are governed by Trades Unionism and the latter will spend thousands and thousands of p[oun]ds on its routine administration and not a farthing to mould the New Social Order – it does not want to be bothered about it . . . Unionism is a mere name. The officials run it like the Directors of the Company operate a mine. And when a row starts they blame the ‘pollies’. I know because the unionists dragged me into the polly ranks.7
These outbursts of cynicism belied a continuing commitment by Curtin to the labour movement and a determination to ensure that the Labor Party emerged from the war strong and undivided.
In the First World War, Curtin had argued that the outcome of the conflict was immaterial to the Australian labour movement since it would not affect the class war. It was no use sacrificing workers’ lives for a British victory since the plight of the Australian working class would not be improved by it. Only the overthrow of capitalism would do that. In the present war, with Australia facing a possible Japanese invasion, the future of the labour movement was at stake along with the life of the nation itself. It was therefore incumbent on the movement to put the security of Australia before all else and for Curtin to extend the maximum amount of cooperation to the war effort of the Government. But that did not mean joining a national government.
Despite pressure to join together as the British political parties had done under Churchill, Curtin and a majority of his colleagues remained adamant that Labor would agree to nothing more than an advisory war council. Labor representatives on such a council could be informed about the Government’s running of the war and proffer their advice. The political responsibility for the decisions would remain with the Government. Menzies eventually settled for such a compromise after an all-party conference in October had failed to produce agreement on anything better. Evatt had attended the conference where he had been dismayed to witness the spirit of friendly cooperation between Menzies and Curtin. He left the conference convinced that Curtin’s apparent timidity would keep Labor in Opposition for the foreseeable future.8
In the midst of these manoeuvrings, Curtin was jolted by the death from cancer of his estranged mentor, Frank Anstey. The old man had spent much of his last years in Sydney before returning to Brunswick to die. He had been working on his memoirs but burnt most of his embittered scribblings on the recommendation of Theodore. His personal papers also went into the fire. From his deathbed, he had asked to see Curtin. However, according to Lloyd Ross, Curtin had gone to the door of Anstey’s familiar Brunswick house, ‘hesitated’ and then ‘walked away’. By the time he returned, Anstey was in a coma. Curtin ‘promised to call next day, didn’t keep his promise, and missed the last glimpses of his dying friend and master and colleague’.9 When he died on 30 October 1940, Curtin was in Perth ‘pathetically wracked [sic] by the inevitable break, as he had so sadly watched the drifting apart’. In accordance with Anstey’s instructions, he was buried the next day without public mourning or any acknowledgment of his lifetime of public service. As a Labor colleague observed: ‘He passed away practically as he lived, not desiring the applause of anybody. He died one night and was buried next morning. Even his most intimate friends did not know.’10 Curtin’s other ‘bright light’ was also fading. Tom Mann had suffered a stroke in November 1939 and would die in March 1941.11
Although the Battle of Britain had been won by the end of October 1940, British intelligence reported that the Germans were switching the weight of their forces towards the east in preparation for an onslaught against Russia. Once that happened, it would free Japanese forces that were on guard against the Russians in Siberia and allow for a possible Japanese move southward towards Australia. An alarming report to the Australian Government in mid-November 1940 on the defences of Singapore suggested that the much-vaunted British naval base would not be able to provide the long-promised protection for Australia against a Japanese invasion. Menzies decided to go to London to press for better defences for the Singapore base, upon which Australian defences had come to hinge. First, though, he had to secure the stability of his weakened government and obtain parliamentary approval for its budget.
The very things that Curtin had been warning against were now coming to fruition. Menzies had brushed his concerns aside and committed Australian troops, air force personnel and naval ships to the European conflict, leaving Australia dangerously exposed. By the end of 1940, Australia’s two trained divisions of troops had been committed to the Middle East along with much of the navy while its air force was largely occupied with the training of airmen for the Royal Air Force’s effort in Europe. With his new position on the Advisory War Council, and armed with the secret defence information that came with that position, Curtin exerted increasing pressure on the Menzies Government to make adequate provision for Australia’s defence.
At the first meeting of the Advisory War Council on 29 October 1940, with Curtin, Forde and Makin as the elected Labor representatives and Jack Beasley representing the Non-Communist Labor Party, Curtin demanded to know where the ships of the Australian Navy were presently stationed ‘and the possibility of disposing them for the defence of the waters north of Australia’. He also pressed for a British battleship to be based at Singapore and for the Government to inform the council about the supply of naval mines, which were needed to defend Australia’s ports and sea lanes from hostile naval action.12 At the same time, in light of the report about Singapore, it was decided to send a brigade of troops from the 8th Division to shore up its defences until Indian troops could take their place. It was intended that the brigade would then join the 6th and 7th divisions, which had been sent to the Middle East where British forces were routing the Italians in Libya. In view of the British military successes in Libya, the Labor representatives on the Advisory War Council suggested that Britain should be able to send three or four battleships to Singapore.13 But Singapore would never be able to compete in the scale of British priorities with its interests in the Mediterranean.
Curtin hoped that Labor’s agreement to the Advisory War Council would bring benefits to its supporters in the form of improved social service payments and increased pay for service personnel. So, when the Government’s post-election budget was put before the council, the Labor representatives pushed for changes that would ease the burden of the war effort on the shoulders of pensioners, wheat farmers and service personnel. However, when Curtin informed the Labor caucus of the concessions he had managed to wring from Menzies, he was unable to convince its members to accept them. Some of the Government’s own MPs had been dissatisfied with the budget and it seemed to some Labor MPs that the Government might fall apart and allow Labor its chance at power. Evatt was in the vanguard of these MPs and was doubly disappointed at being ill when the election of Labor MPs for the Advisory War Council had taken place and thereby had missed out on a seat. Spurred on by Evatt during a rowdy five-hour meeting, heated accusations were tossed at Curtin about his friendly relationship with Menzies and his determination, as he put it, ‘to make this Parliament workable’. Curtin was so distraught at these personal attacks, and the refusal by caucus to accept the concessions he had achieved, that he left the room offering to resign as leader. The prospect of his resignation was sufficient to silence his critics since there was no obvious alternative leader upon whom the party factions could agree. Evatt and Scullin worked out a compromise whereby the Labor representatives on the council were instructed simply to ‘do their best’ to get further concessions.14
The suspicions of those Labor MPs who alleged Curtin was anxious to avoid the responsibilities of the prime ministership seemed to be borne out by his behaviour during a by-election in December 1940. The poll in the Western Australian seat of Swan was caused by the death of the sitting Country Party member. With the political pendulum seemingly swinging back towards Labor, it offered the possibility of Labor wresting the seat from the conservatives and thereby becoming the largest party in the House of Representatives and being able to demand that Menzies resign in favour of Curtin. It was a distant prospect but it was sufficient to send Evatt racing off across the continent to support the Labor candidate, James Dinan. Unfortunately for Labor, Dinan had connections with the Communist Party and the local Labor executive was cool in its support for him. Although Curtin shared their reservations, he was obliged as leader to campaign on the candidate’s behalf. However, the stress of the federal election just two months before, combined with the subsequent pressures from Evatt and others and the death of Anstey, had worn away at his health. When Curtin arrived by train at Adelaide on his way to Perth in mid-December, he collapsed under the strain and went no further. It was left to an angry Evatt to campaign almost single-handedly in the by-election, which Labor lost. Dinan was subsequently expelled from the Labor Party for berating Curtin over the loss. Evatt returned to the east suspicious that Curtin’s illness was more political than medical. Indeed, Curtin later confessed to Lloyd Ross that he had deliberately refrained from supporting Dinan because he feared that Menzies knew of Dinan’s communist connections and would use the information against him.15
Curtin recovered his strength in Cottesloe over the Christmas break. While there, he had a chance meeting in the street with his former colleague on the AJA, Paul Hasluck, who was considering enlisting in the army. Curtin urged that he consider going instead into the public service where trained staff were desperately needed. Shortly afterwards, Hasluck was offered a position with the Department of External Affairs in Canberra after Curtin had apparently interceded on his behalf.16 So began a career in the public service, and later in parliament, that would see Hasluck ultimately appointed Governor-General in 1969.
When Curtin returned to Canberra, he oversaw the final reunification of the Labor Party. Maurice Blackburn had predicted privately that 1941 would see Labor split asunder as the various factions rebelled against Curtin’s spirit of cooperation with Menzies.17 However, instead of Blackburn’s prediction being borne out, the Langites under Jack Beasley returned once more to the Labor fold in February 1941, presenting an image of comparative unity to the electorate. Beasley was allowed to retain his membership of the Advisory War Council while Evatt was also admitted to its ranks in March along with an upcoming Country Party MP, Jack McEwen. In charge of the council, and of the Government, was the Country Party leader, ‘Artie’ Fadden, who acted as prime minister during Menzies’s prolonged absence overseas from January to May 1941. Fadden was the backslapping son of a police constable who developed a warm rapport with Curtin, who he later described as ‘one of the greatest Australians ever’.18 Fadden had what Menzies was sorely in need of: an ability to relate to his colleagues without rancour and overweening arrogance, and a commitment to making a practical impact on the war effort rather than making a political point to an audience.
Curtin was determined to uphold what he regarded as an almost sacred trust to bring the labour movement through the war unscathed by the divisions that had rent it apart in the previous war. He was also determined to help bring Australia through the war unscathed by invasion and would do what he could regardless of political divisions. As he had told Sir Walter James nearly two years before, he was determined to ‘act and think helpfully’.19 The Australian people demanded no less of him. As he had informed parliament in December 1940, he accepted Menzies’s mandate and would do his ‘best to promote the good government of this country’. While Australians were ‘divided as to which party or parties shall govern Australia’, they were united in wanting ‘complete cooperation by those who are charged with the responsibility to ensure the safety of our country’.20 While this attitude earned him plaudits from the public, it continued to arouse the enmity of some of his colleagues.
Curtin survived the barbs of his detractors by relying on the firm support of several colleagues and the companionship of friends. These supporters also helped him to survive the loneliness of Canberra, which was still not much more than a country town of some ten thousand inhabitants, where the newly appointed public servant Paul Hasluck rode his horse to work, leaving it tethered in a nearby paddock.21 Foremost among his close colleagues were the ex-Prime Minister, James Scullin, and Ben Chifley. When in Melbourne, he continued to keep in touch with the surviving Bruce girls, Yatala and ‘Bob’, whose friendship had been so important to him in the years up until his departure for Perth. And in Canberra there was Belle Southwell at the Kurrajong, now in her late forties, and her brothers Fred and Jack with whom Curtin also developed an intimate friendship. Indeed, he nominated Fred Southwell as his closest friend in Canberra during these war years.
The strength of these friendships helped Curtin in his struggle to stay off the booze. There have been many claims as to when he gave up alcohol and who was responsible for helping him to do so. As was noted previously, the conventional story has him giving up alcohol upon his return to Perth in 1931 following his defeat at the election and suggests that Elsie was the cause of his reformation. She certainly helped to keep him away from grog when she could, even ringing the mayor of Fremantle to ensure that there was no beer on Curtin’s table at official dinners.22 Although he stayed at the temperance Victoria Palace Hotel in Melbourne, he was reportedly so much the worse for drink during one of his stays there that he was unable for several days to take the train to Canberra. The story has Elsie finally getting him aboard the train to Canberra only to find a whisky bottle bulging in his jacket pocket. She reportedly threw it out the open window. According to the story, which was related by the nephew of the hotel receptionist, it was this episode that prompted Curtin to give up alcohol.23 The problem was that Curtin had given up alcohol more than once. While Elsie did what she could, and ensured that alcohol was never kept openly in their Cottesloe house, she could not always be with him.
Elsie later claimed that Curtin only drank before their marriage and during his first time in Canberra.24 Curtin too was keen to minimise the time of his dependence. In an interview for the Women’s Weekly just prior to the 1940 election, he claimed that he drank only tea and water and had ‘wowsed’ ever since his marriage in 1917. A picture accompanying the article reinforced this message by showing his long-time secretary, Adele Mildenhall, handing him a cup of tea.25 The explicit mention of his past drinking was presumably done to still the rumours that had bubbled below the surface of public life. Although he was dissembling about having been teetotal since 1917 – and reliable reports have him drinking secretly in Sydney and Perth in the late 1930s – it seems likely that he had finally ‘wowsed’ by the time of the article in 1940. Although he had been unable to keep his promise to his colleagues to give up alcohol on accepting the leadership in 1935, the combination of Elsie in Perth, and occasionally in Canberra, and the watchful and commanding presence of Belle Southwell at the Kurrajong, helped to keep him sober.26 It was a battle that had to be waged each day. In place of whisky, Curtin turned to cigarettes, increasing his smoking to some forty a day.
During those quiet Sunday afternoons when his colleagues had disappeared to their homes in nearby States and Curtin remained largely alone in Canberra, he would often hire a car and driver to take him for a drive into the surrounding bush. Accompanying him would be three or four young women from Parliament House who would clamber into the back of the seven-seater Buick while Curtin sat in the front with the driver, Horace Cleaver. According to Cleaver’s account of these outings, Belle Southwell ‘always made sure that there was afternoon tea packed in a nice hamper for John Curtin before we left on our picnic spot’. With different girls accompanying him each time, they would often head for the Brindabella Mountains which was his ‘favourite spot’:
you could drive up there and you could look down on to Canberra. There were quite a lot of kangaroos hopping around. There was a very bad season that time. The kangaroos would come up and even feed out of our hands for a piece of bread. And he used to love doing that. He always took his field glasses with him so he could see around the country.
Just as he had taken long walks across the sand hills of Cottesloe to calm his troubled mind, now he would leave the girls behind at the picnic spot to talk with Cleaver while he went for long, solitary walks in the bush. The walks may have brought back memories of his time with the Timber Workers’ Union or even earlier childhood memories from Charlton where Frank Tate had tried to inculcate in the pupils of his inspectorate a love of the native fauna and flora. Cleaver does not recall Curtin ever speaking about his family during these picnics but he sensed that Curtin ‘felt lonely’ and ‘that was one of the ways that he used to feel much better when he went for a drive and had someone to talk to on his little picnic stops’.27
With Menzies away in London from 19 January until 23 May, and Labor agreeing not to threaten the Government in his absence, Curtin was able to develop a good working relationship with acting Prime Minister Fadden. According to Fadden, Curtin gave him ‘not only his personal cooperation, understanding and loyalty, but also his mateship’. Their association ‘developed into deep friendship’, which Fadden ascribed to their common origins as sons of Irish-Australian police constables.28 But it was more than that. They shared a common touch that Menzies lacked and were both more concerned with getting things done than pontificating about them. As Paul Hasluck observed, Fadden was ‘an affable, astute, story-telling man, untroubled by the deeper significance of problems and thus the readier to dispose of them’.29 Perhaps because he was a Queenslander, Fadden also was much more seized than Menzies with the possible peril Australia faced from Japan and joined with Curtin in alerting the Australian people to the danger. Curtin used the opportunity of Menzies’s absence to pursue with renewed vigour the question of Australia’s defence.
There was a vital change, though, in Curtin’s approach which now paid greater deference to the defence needs of Britain’s eastern empire rather than just to the defence of Australia. It was perhaps the report of the defence officials about the parlous state of Singapore’s defence that caused this shift in Curtin’s thinking. Although the Singapore strategy had never been a viable one, and Britain was even now reducing the projected scale of air defences for the island and still refusing to base any substantial naval forces there, Curtin became a belated convert to it.
Curtin may have been misled partly by a message from Churchill in late 1940 who, while refusing to send naval forces to Singapore at that time, promised to ‘sacrifice the Mediterranean position’ in the event of Australia being ‘seriously threatened by invasion’.30 This suggested that the British Government would send ships to Singapore in the event of war in the Pacific and it was therefore in Australia’s interests to ensure that the island was defended. Curtin may also have been concerned to shrug off the damaging political label of isolationism that had attached itself to him, and to the Labor Party, during the 1937 election. There was also the effect on Curtin of his role on the Advisory War Council where he was subject to the influence of the conservative members, the chiefs of staff who often advised the council, and its British-minded secretary, Frederick Shedden. Whatever the reason, Curtin embraced imperial defence just at the time when there was more reason than ever to abandon it. And he would be remarkably slow to relinquish his attachment to it, as thousands of Australian service personnel would find to their cost in 1942.
With Fadden chairing the Advisory War Council, and with the chiefs of staff in attendance, the Labor members made searching inquiries about Australia’s defence position. In early February, they were told that it was being hampered by trade unions who were impeding the activities of the navy and air force. As a result, the council approved a statement by Fadden warning that Australia’s ‘very existence’ was at stake and calling upon ‘all sections of the community to ensure that the maximum effort is exerted to carry us through the vital months ahead’. With the parlous defence position of Singapore now clear, and with Japan being predicted to launch a southward lunge in the near future, Curtin now argued for even more Australian troops to be sent to Singapore.31
The following week, Curtin told the annual convention of the AWU in Sydney on 12 February that Australia’s position now was ‘equally as vulnerable as that of Great Britain’. While Australia should continue to provide Britain with food and other matériel help, Curtin argued that it was no longer appropriate for it to be sending men overseas. However, instead of Australia concentrating its forces on its own defence, Curtin argued that it must ensure ‘that there are land forces available so that there is no back-door entrance to Singapore’. He was not arguing for the return of Australian forces that were already in the Middle East and elsewhere, but he did press for the ‘paramount principle’ in the future disposition of Australian forces to be ‘the defence of this part of the Empire’.32 Curtin received a rousing reception after Clarrie Fallon, the Queensland AWU secretary, had moved among the delegates telling them that Curtin had ‘lost his confidence, he’s about to chuck it in, and I want you all to give him a standing ovation; and don’t stop clapping until he sits down’. According to Clyde Cameron, who was one of the delegates, it had the desired effect on Curtin, with him displaying ‘more and more confidence as he spoke’.33
The next day, after another anxious meeting of the Advisory War Council, Fadden, Curtin and Beasley issued a joint statement declaring that the war had entered ‘a new stage of urgency’ and calling for the ‘greatest effort of preparedness this country has ever made’. The statement provoked alarming headlines in the press and caused Fadden to be rebuked by his cabinet for issuing a joint statement with Labor. At the same time, it caused Curtin to be criticised by some of his colleagues for joining with the Government and thereby diverting public attention away from domestic issues. The rambunctious NSW MP Eddie Ward tried to have Labor’s representatives withdraw from the council but caucus refused to support him.34
The plight of Australia was even worse than Fadden and Curtin imagined. A conference of British and American service chiefs in Washington had been discussing their reaction to the possibility of war with Japan and had decided in such an event to concentrate on defeating Germany first and, at best, to fight a limited, holding war against Japan. Moreover, the discussions raised real fears as to whether the Americans would react at all if Japan sidestepped American territory in the Pacific and simply attacked British or Dutch territories. If the Japanese did pursue such a strategy, Australia could expect little or no assistance from Britain and nothing from the United States. Fadden only learned of these discussions some hours after he had issued his joint warning with Curtin. It prompted him to cancel arrangements for the dispatch of the remaining 8th Division troops to the Middle East. They would now be concentrated instead with the brigade at Singapore. Australia continued to be deluded by the British promises to abandon the Mediterranean, if necessary, in order to send ships to Singapore and thereby save Australia.35
Although the military situation in the Middle East had seen a run of British victories against the Italians, that was all put at risk when Churchill ordered the pursuit of the Italians to stop and for two Australian divisions, along with other forces, to be sent to Greece in March 1941 to meet an expected German invasion. Churchill was anxious to impress American public opinion and also entertained vain hopes of creating a Balkan front that could attack Germany’s supposed ‘soft underbelly’. The troops for the Greek expedition were largely Australian and New Zealanders. Over brandy and cigars at Chequers on 23 February, Churchill raised the question with Menzies who, at a subsequent meeting of the British War Cabinet and despite his misgivings about the chances of success for the troops, gave his conditional approval to the use of the Australians. Despite its own misgivings, the Australian War Cabinet also approved the commitment. Curtin and his Labor colleagues on the Advisory War Council were not consulted and refused to bear any responsibility for it when they were finally informed on 18 March.36
The Greek expedition confirmed the worst fears of its reluctant supporters. The Australians were sent in against German tanks and dive-bombers to support a Greek army that still relied largely on horsepower and which was already fully stretched fighting the Italians in Albania. The Australians were soon in headlong retreat from northern Greece all the way back to the beaches south of Athens from where most were evacuated to Crete. There they faced a German airborne invasion and another hurried evacuation leaving many thousands behind. By June 1941, some 8000 Australian troops had been lost in the two operations. From Alexandria, Australia’s official war correspondent, Kenneth Slessor, watched as the events unfolded, angrily declaring that
either the British or Australian Government or both was prepared callously and cynically to sacrifice a comparatively small force of Australian fighting men for the sake of a political gesture – i.e. to gamble with Australian lives on a wild chance, wilder than Gallipoli.37
What was worse, the dispatch of forces to Greece had left the British forces in Libya hard-pressed to follow up their successes against the Italians, who were now being reinforced by a German panzer division under the command of Erwin Rommel. Soon it was the British who were on the run, retreating all the way back into Egypt while leaving Australia’s 9th Division trapped in the Libyan port of Tobruk.
The events in the Mediterranean had dangerous implications for Australia since it was from the Mediterranean that Britain had promised to send forces to save Australia from invasion. Now all those forces could be lost as the result of one mad throw of the dice by Churchill. More than ever, the defence of Britain’s eastern empire, including Australia, would rest on Australia’s shoulders rather than Britain’s. In the worsening circumstances, Curtin continued to appeal for the labour movement to join wholeheartedly in the struggle for the nation’s survival. As he told the workers of Western Australia on 1 May, all their hopes for a fair future would be lost in the event of the nation’s defeat. Declaring that ‘the cause of Labor’ had always ‘been the cause of Australia’, Curtin promised that Labor would never ‘falter or waver in its loyalty and service to the advancement of Australia’.38 Labor and its reluctant leader soon would be put to the test.