Just before eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 7 December, a formation of nearly two hundred Japanese warplanes swooped on the unprepared defences of the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. An hour later, another formation added to the destruction. By the time they had disappeared to rejoin their distant aircraft carriers waiting to the north, six American battleships, the pride of the Pacific Fleet, had been sunk or were sinking and more than three hundred American aircraft had been damaged or destroyed on the ground.1 Other Japanese attacks struck at American and British possessions across the western Pacific. Because of the International Date Line and the different time zones, it was early Monday morning in Melbourne when news of the Japanese attacks was picked up by the Australian Government’s short-wave radio monitoring service. At the Victoria Palace Hotel, Don Rodgers was alerted and quickly roused Curtin from his sleep. ‘Well, it has come,’ said Curtin.2
As a nation, Australia now faced the possibility that it had long feared – an Asian invasion. As the leader of the Australian nation, it was incumbent upon Curtin to confront this nightmare. On the shoulders of this anti-militarist now rested the responsibility for organising the nation’s fight for life. Decisions that he would make would necessarily bring death to many of his fellow Australians as he sent them forward into battle. But his decisions would also serve to save the nation as a whole. So, too, would his example of selfless commitment help to fortify those around him as well as the country at large. Of course, the decisions were not Curtin’s alone. He remained leader of a minority government and Australia remained a small element in a world war, the course of which was determined largely by decisions taken in the capitals of the major allies: the United States, Britain and Russia. But the coming six months would see Australian forces stand largely alone in the face of the Japanese onslaught.
A war cabinet meeting was held that morning at which the chiefs of staff reported on the latest news. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor was unexpected, a war in the Pacific had been anticipated for years. Yet Australia was ill prepared for it, as Curtin and his colleagues now discovered. Although only part of the militia was going to be called into camp, there were only sufficient light machine guns and anti-tank guns to equip their regiments at half-strength, while artillery would also be on a reduced scale. Although Vickers machine guns were being produced in Australia at the rate of 200 a month, 125 of them were being sent to India and only twenty of the remainder were being supplied to the army. When the army chief, Lieutenant General Sturdee, argued for the army to get more of them, Chifley advised that it could only be done with the agreement of the Indian Government. Even rifles were ‘in short supply’ and many troops in rearward areas would be without them. Tanks were not mentioned, since there were none in Australia other than for training purposes. Neither were there any modern fighter planes or heavy bombers. And the service chiefs held out little hope of obtaining any air reinforcements to meet the present emergency.3
Despite this, Curtin declared that he was not intending to bring back the three AIF divisions in the Middle East. However, he did question whether air force trainees should continue to be sent to Britain. When the service chiefs left the meeting, the all-important war cabinet secretary, Frederick Shedden, reinforced the desperate message in case the ministers had missed it. After more than two years of war, and several years of prewar preparation, there was not one division in Australia, out of the seven that existed on paper, that could be deployed ‘as a good fighting force’. Nevertheless, they took comfort from the entry into the war of the United States which, as Evatt predicted, would ensure eventual victory. And they expected that Singapore would hold out now that a British naval squadron had finally been sent there.4
While the United States would ensure an eventual Allied victory against Japan, it took Curtin and his colleagues several weeks to appreciate that there could be heavy costs to be exacted before that victory was achieved. They did not realise that the agreed Anglo-American strategy, in the case of a war being fought simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific, stipulated that they would concentrate Anglo-American forces on defeating Germany first. Immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill hastened to Washington to ensure that there was no American retreat from the ‘Germany first’ strategy in the face of the Pearl Harbor provocation. He need not have worried. Roosevelt stood by their earlier agreement, acknowledging that the main enemy of the worldwide conflict was Germany and that the main prize to be won by the victors was Europe. MacArthur and his forces in the Philippines would be left to wither while the British Empire garrisons in Hong Kong and Singapore would also be left to their separate fates.
Although he had been schooled in the ways of the empire, it was Shedden who helped to strengthen Curtin’s resolve to steer a separate course for Australia. Shedden had accompanied Menzies to London earlier that year and had visited Singapore and the Middle East. He knew from this experience that Australia could expect little from Churchill, despite his blustering promises. It was Shedden who now urged that Curtin declare the war against Japan to be ‘a new war’, rather than ‘merely another incident in the present war’.5 As such, it demanded a strong response from the Allies. Curtin did not need much urging to accept Shedden’s advice which, as Shedden would have realised, accorded well with Curtin’s long-held views on the defence of Australia. To emphasise the new Australian outlook, the Government issued a formal declaration of war against Japan, something that its predecessor had not done in the case of Germany when Menzies had been content simply to follow the lead of Britain.6
After the war cabinet meeting, Curtin spoke at a public meeting to raise money to replace HMAS Sydney. He called for an ‘all-in’ war effort ‘to resist those who would destroy our title to Australia’ and ‘overthrow British authority in the Pacific’. Appealing to his audience with a potent blend of religion and racism, Curtin proclaimed that it was ‘now up to us to hold what God has given to us and maintain the traditions that have been born into our manhood’. He called for workers to forgo their holidays and for employers to provide an example by not going on ‘golfing parties’ when their workers had to stay at their jobs.7 That evening, he broadcast to the nation in similar terms. ‘Men and women of Australia,’ he intoned, ‘the call is to you for your courage, your physical and mental ability, your inflexible determination that we as a nation of free people shall survive.’ For the country itself was now ‘the stake in this conflict’. Warning his worried audience as they huddled around their wireless sets that it was now the nation’s ‘darkest hour’, Curtin nevertheless predicted that they would ‘hold this country, and keep it as a citadel for the British-speaking race and as a place where civilisation will persist’.8
One leading Labor official had predicted that it would be ‘a bloody calamity’ to have Jack Curtin leading a Labor government in the wartime circumstances of 1941.9 Others had suggested that Curtin would not last as prime minister ‘for more than a couple of months’, citing as evidence ‘the minor illnesses, thought to be of nervous origin, which had a habit of attacking him whenever heavy political weather arrived’. Moreover, his apparent ‘indecisiveness’ over minor matters did not augur well for him presiding over major matters. However, as a journalist observed in the Sydney Morning Herald, Curtin was ‘a miraculously changed person’ as prime minister. It now seemed that ‘the bigger the matter that has come to him, the more decisive has been his handling of it – the more the load of work and worry upon him, the better his apparent physical trim’.10 That was certainly the impression he gave to some observers. But the outbreak of the Pacific War would test him as never before. And never more so than in its first three months. As he grappled with the prospect of an imminent Japanese invasion, Curtin had to arouse the Australian people to a heightened but purposeful sense of their nation’s danger while also securing much needed assistance from the United States and Britain.
For Curtin, the war in the Pacific meant cancelling the plans he had for enjoying a family Christmas in Perth. He could hardly go there after cancelling holiday leave for service personnel and announcing on 8 December that ‘no private citizen must now proceed on holiday. It cannot be allowed.’ He quickly backed down on the latter announcement, simply appealing instead to Australians ‘to consider the welfare of the nation’ before taking holidays.11 It did not prevent Elsie, who had spent six weeks at the Lodge, from leaving Canberra by train on 9 December to spend Christmas with her aged mother and daughter.12 She met briefly with Curtin in Melbourne where he was still occupied in discussions with his war cabinet ministers and the chiefs of staff. Later, Elsie told a reporter as she waited to change trains in Adelaide that she hoped Curtin would be able to join them by plane for Christmas. She also ‘hoped to return to Canberra after Christmas, but everything would depend upon the war situation’. She pointed out, in the wake of the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, that it vindicated Curtin’s long-held policy of ‘Bombers before Battleships’.13 As her train trundled laboriously across the Nullarbor, Curtin sent her a cable advising that the weather awaiting her in Perth was ‘tolerable’ and that he had telephoned young Elsie twice and all was well. He confided that he had ‘had heavy time. Am alright. Will be Canberra tomorrow and phone you. Love John.’14 The cable is one of the few remaining pieces of correspondence between them from this time. Many of his letters were apparently burnt by his widow after the war.15 Curtin also had less time for writing and had got in the habit of making a nightly phone call to Cottesloe from his parliamentary office.
As Elsie had argued, the outbreak of the Pacific War, and the disaster suffered by American and British battleships at the hands of Japanese airmen, seemed to vindicate in the most dramatic fashion the prewar defence stance of Curtin. He was also quick to ram the message home to the Australian electorate, taking a swipe at the conservatives in the process. In a statement on 11 December, as Australians read with concern of the sinking of the British ships, Curtin reminded them that: ‘For years I have insisted that a maximum air defence was imperative to the efficiency of land and sea forces – however strong they might be. Now we are faced with the reality.’ He called for ‘an absolute concentration on war production and war necessities’ and an end to the old attitude of ‘business as usual’ that had been promoted by Menzies in 1939 and which had proved so difficult to shift.16
The following day, the war cabinet approved the call-up of 114 000 more men for the army, and the transfer of Australian troops to Port Moresby, Timor and to Darwin. At the same time, an Australian battalion on Rabaul was left without reinforcements and with no hope of resisting the Japanese attack when it came just over a month later. The moves were meant to defend against a Japanese invasion of Australia, with the chiefs of staff arguing that the Japanese would first have to capture these outlying islands, along with Singapore. However, even when this increased call-up was completed and the men trained, the army in Australia would still be less than 250 000 which, the chiefs conceded, was insufficient to protect Australia against anything more than serious raids. It was time ‘to establish and train now the forces that would be required to prevent and to meet an invasion’.17 No more telling indictment could have been made of the previous government’s commitment to imperial defence and its consequent neglect of the defence of the Australian continent.
In the context of what Curtin called this ‘new war’,18 and conscious of the continuing political tightrope on which he walked, Curtin suggested to Fadden, as Leader of the Opposition, that he be allowed to co-opt conservative MPs as advisers to the Government. While Fadden offered any assistance that the Opposition could render ‘in this grave hour’, he proposed instead that his MPs with wartime administrative experience should be brought into a Supreme War Council that would replace both the war cabinet and Advisory War Council.19 It would be a national government in all but name. Given the long and fruitless history of this issue, Fadden cannot have imagined that it would now be accepted by Curtin. And it was not. Instead of establishing a Supreme War Council, Curtin suggested that decisions of the Advisory War Council that were agreed to by the Government ministers on the council should also stand as war cabinet decisions. This would streamline the rather cumbersome decision-making procedure utilised by the AWC in the new emergency. It would go some way towards having a Supreme War Council in practice, without conceding it in principle, and thereby averting unwanted political disunity in Labor’s ranks.20
Parliament was called back into session on 16 December to discuss the dramatic turn of events in the Pacific. A grim Curtin told the chamber that, while he could not predict ‘what the fortunes of Australia will be in the weeks, months and years that lie ahead’, he could proclaim confidently ‘that the political machinery and administrative services, the fighting forces and the labouring classes of this country today stand united . . .’ It was now Australia’s turn to endure what Curtin called its ‘gravest hour’.21 General Iven Mackay, commander of the home forces, urged that the public be warned that the Japanese were likely to enjoy early success in invading Australia but that they should keep ‘cool and level headed’, remembering that ‘a nation which suffers even severe losses at the beginning of a war may still win in the end’.22 Perhaps convinced by the danger of Australia’s situation, Fadden, Hughes and Menzies agreed to Curtin’s suggestion for strengthening the Advisory War Council.23
Although Curtin had conceded that Australians could take Christmas Day and Boxing Day as holidays, his own work did not stop. He was not able to get away to Perth by plane, while young Elsie, who had reportedly been planning to join him in Canberra, was prevented from doing so by his ban on holiday travel.24 News that Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Washington, and a report on 23 December from the Australian representative in Singapore that the British ‘bastion’ was likely to fall in ‘a matter of weeks’, forced Curtin, Chifley and Evatt to spend much of their time dashing off cables to the two leaders appealing for Australia to be defended. Churchill had promised Menzies in April 1941 that a Japanese attack on Singapore would see Britain send an aerial armada to protect it in the absence of the long-promised fleet. Now that his promise was put to the test, it was found to amount to little more than fifty Hurricane fighter planes that were being sent by ship and packed in crates. It was a token contribution that would not be able to avert the coming catastrophe. Blasting the planned reinforcements for Singapore as ‘utterly inadequate’, Curtin predicted that the Australian troops on the island would face a similar situation to that experienced by Australian forces in Greece and Crete.25 It was just one of many cables sent by Curtin to Churchill during these anxious months that saw relations with Britain plummet to dangerous depths.
As he informed Elsie in Perth, his Christmas week had been ‘heavy’:
cables in and out have just been staggering. The Roosevelt–Churchill meeting required that Australia should put its view of all matters to each of them and do it in time to be dealt with by each before decisions were reached. That was hurry for us.
On Christmas Day, he was able to stay in bed until 11 a.m. but then worked for a couple of hours before joining six airmen from the local air force base who he had invited to the Lodge for lunch. He had rung the base asking whether six men from Western Australia could join him. When it was found there were 30 Western Australians at the base, they drew lots while Curtin promised that the others could join him in subsequent weeks. Thanking Curtin for his gesture, the airmen hailed him as ‘the living voice of freedom’ and wished him ‘the very best health to sustain your robust mentality to meet the onerous trials of 1942’.26
Although Curtin had opposed the dispatch of an expeditionary force to the Middle East, he still hesitated about requesting its recall to defend Australia, despite the likely fall of Singapore. He still relied for strategic advice on the chiefs of staff, two of whom were British officers, and on Frederick Shedden, none of whom were prepared to call for the return of the Australian troops. Instead, they had recommended, and the Government had agreed, that the three divisions be maintained in the Middle East along with a pool of reinforcements. Ironically, it was Churchill who first suggested at the end of December that a division of Australian troops from the Middle East might be shifted to meet the Japanese threat. Churchill did not, though, suggest that they go to Australia, but to India or Singapore. While Curtin rejected the idea of the division going to India, he did not insist on it returning to Australia. It is likely that, had it got there in time, Curtin would have been willing for it to have reinforced Singapore. In fact, he approved at the end of December the dispatch to Singapore of a further 1800 men to reinforce the 8th Division that was retreating along the Malay Peninsula towards Singapore.27 While he was slow to relinquish faith in the Singapore strategy, Curtin was clear that Australia’s salvation would lie more in Washington, and even Moscow, than in London.
Curtin was asked by the Melbourne Herald to provide a New Year message for the Australian people. When published on 27 December, the message would resound around the world, causing Churchill to be outraged and Roosevelt to suggest that it smacked of ‘panic and disloyalty’.28 The statement has since come to be regarded popularly as marking the point at which Australia came of age, breaking free of the historic bonds of empire to seek its salvation with the Americans. There was much in it that was audacious. It called for Russia to declare war against Japan so that the Japanese might be deflected from their southward advance and forced to retain substantial forces to guard against a Russian attack from Siberia. Churchill was implacably opposed to such a proposal as he needed Stalin, like Roosevelt, to concentrate on Germany. The message also declared that Australia and the United States should have the primary role in deciding Pacific strategy. This challenged the cosy strategic relationship that Churchill had developed with Roosevelt. But what Churchill particularly found ‘insulting’, and Roosevelt thought to be disloyal, was the oft-quoted sentence: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’.29 In a blistering message to Curtin, Churchill attacked the ‘harsh tones’ of Curtin’s cables as well as this latest message and threatened to broadcast over Curtin’s head to the Australian people.30 While Curtin’s old soapbox colleague and Victorian ALP president, Fred Riley, praised the New Year message as ‘a clarion call to Australian nationhood’,31 Australian conservatives and some sections of the press shared Churchill’s anger.32 Curtin moved to placate them by denying that his statement indicated any break with Britain.33
There has been some dispute as to whether Curtin wrote the message himself. According to Don Rodgers, it was he rather than Curtin who drafted it, claiming that Curtin ‘made little or no change to the draft’, other than adding lines from a poem by Bernard O’Dowd. Ross McMullin claims that Curtin ‘amended and strengthened’ Rodgers’s draft while Norman Lee argues that Curtin wrote the whole statement. Lee cites a comment by Curtin, who asked rhetorically of an Age journalist: ‘Do you think any Prime Minister worthy of the name would leave an important announcement like that to his press officer? Of course I drew up the statement myself.’ Moreover, claims Lee, ‘every sentence bears the stamp of Curtin’s personality’. That may be, but the clarity of the expression suggests that a hand other than Curtin’s had a major part in the writing of the message. It still reflected Curtin’s views. As Rodgers readily conceded, the draft was written after he had ‘many talks’ with Curtin on the war and knew his views intimately. The New Year message was also in accord with a report on the strategic situation submitted to Curtin by Shedden on 26 December.34
Whatever his intention may have been about publicly challenging Anglo-American strategy, Curtin’s message was also directed at steeling the resolve of the Australian people to make an ‘all-in’ effort to win the war. There is also a suggestion that Curtin was going to use the war to force through the social changes that had been blocked for so long by a succession of conservative governments and the resistance of the Australian people. He had looked forward in hopeful anticipation during the last war to that conflict causing a social revolution. He had been disappointed by the failure of the ‘great mob’, both in Australia and elsewhere. Now he was prime minister in another conflict and could impose a revolution of sorts on the recalcitrant populace in the interests of the war effort. As he declared in his New Year message, he was intent on ‘revolutionising . . . the Australian way of life’, calling on ‘every citizen’ to ‘place himself, his private and business affairs, his entire mode of living on a war footing’.35 It would be a revolution that was meant to be marked by austerity, with Australians living simple but decent lives, bereft of ‘beer and bets’, and sharing more fairly the burdens of the war. It would be a revolution in the government of the nation as the federal Government took over powers from the States and established Canberra as a real national capital. It would be a revolution by way of reform, just as Anstey had argued in his younger days. First, though, the fight for survival had to be won.
After mollifying the outraged conservatives, whose world had been tipped on its head by his New Year message, Curtin wrote to Elsie on 5 January, confiding his frustrations with Britain and Churchill:
The war goes very badly and I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily. He has been in Africa and India and they count before Australia and New Zealand. The truth is that Britain never thought Japan would fight and made no preparations to meet that eventuality.
In addition they never believed airpower could outfight seapower and now they will not risk ships uncovered by air support and there is no early probability of air support. In Australia we have to produce our own aircraft. Notwithstanding two years of Menzies we have to really start production.
But enough, I love you, and that is all there is to say.36
It was a clear-eyed appreciation of Australia’s predicament but there was no clear-eyed appreciation of how Australia might get out of its predicament. Producing aircraft at this juncture was hardly the answer since they would not be available in sufficient strength and in time to meet the anticipated Japanese attack. Curtin also seems not yet to have been aware that Australia’s main fighting aircraft, the Wirraway, was really an advanced trainer aircraft. Producing more of them was a waste of manpower. While Australian production could not quickly make up for years of neglect and the diversion of resources to the European theatre, the arrival of American forces gave hope that Curtin’s New Year message might be answered.
The first Americans to arrive in Australia were there to organise a reinforcement route to support the embattled forces of General MacArthur in the Philippines. However, as it became clear that his forces were doomed, the American reinforcements began to build up in Australia instead. They were concentrated in Brisbane but with their headquarters at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. The commander of these American forces, General George Brett, arrived on 28 December, the day after Curtin’s appeal to the United States was published. There was no direct relationship between the two events. With the likely loss of the Philippines, the United States had decided for its own reasons that Australia represented the most obvious base in which forces could be gathered before eventually unleashing them against the Japanese.37 And Australia for its own reasons was anxious to welcome them, not least as a way of achieving a more direct link with Roosevelt and becoming ‘largely independent of the ineffectual pleadings hitherto necessary with Mr Churchill’.38
Of course, some of the American troops inevitably would be black, which was a problem when Australians were defending the White Australia Policy as much as anything else. As the conservative Adelaide academic Grenfell Price observed, the war against Japan united Australians ‘in the blood brotherhood of our white descent’.39 Initially, the Advisory War Council decided on 12 January that no black American troops would be accepted in Australia since it could affect ‘the maintenance of the White Australia policy in the post-war settlement’. Curtin overruled the council after being assured that the troops were for construction purposes in tropical Australia and that the American Government ‘would have regard to Australian susceptibilities in the numbers they decide to dispatch’.40 Curtin could not afford to offend the Americans in the face of the remorseless advance of the Japanese.
Among the birthday greetings that Curtin received that January was one from Lord Gowrie praising Curtin’s ‘calm courage, energy, and judgement’. Curtin replied with characteristic humility, claiming that Gowrie did him ‘far too much honor’ but hoping that
my new year will be marked by events of such satisfaction to you and to the Empire and His Majesty and all his subjects will be the happier as the result. Such service as I can render is a matter of pride as well as duty . . . 41
He wrote in a similar vein to the Western Australian feminist, Bessie Rischbieth, then living in London, who had written to congratulate Curtin on him becoming prime minister. He acknowledged that the responsibility was ‘a heavy one’ and ‘I can only say that I will do my best’. He promised to pass her message on to ‘Mrs Curtin’ when he returned to Perth, which he hoped would be ‘in the near future’.42 First, though, he would have to deal with the deteriorating military situation.
Churchill, who was enjoying the winter sun in Florida, continued to fob off the Australian requests for reinforcements and for Australia to be represented on a decision-making body in Washington to direct the Pacific War. On 8 January, he assured Curtin that he was thinking of Australia’s interests ‘at every moment’ but was still convinced that it would not face anything more serious than air raids. Privately, he complained that Australians were being ‘jumpy about invasion’, suggesting that their apparent want of fortitude was due to them coming from ‘bad stock’. However, it was increasingly clear that Australians were right to be ‘jumpy’, with the Japanese pushing towards Singapore. Curtin was not mollified by Churchill’s assurances, but still remained fixated by the need to defend Singapore and Malaya where the soldiers of the 8th Division were presently fighting a rearguard action. The loss of Singapore, warned Curtin, would ‘evoke a violent public reaction’ in Australia. Churchill, though, was already becoming reconciled to its loss and turning his attention to the defence of Burma. On 21 January, Churchill confided to the British War Cabinet Defence Committee, with Australia’s Earle Page in attendance, that the battle for Singapore might be lost and that the defence of Burma was important. Misinterpreting the discussion, Page warned Canberra that Churchill was planning to evacuate Singapore when he really planned simply to abandon it to its fate as he had done with the British garrison in Hong Kong.43 Worn down by the strain of leadership, Curtin had already left Melbourne by the time that Page’s alarming cable was received.
It was not only the war that was wearing away at Curtin’s strength. Despite the war emergency, there were various industrial stoppages that forced him to take a strong stand. A threatened stop-work meeting by transport workers saw Curtin threaten them in turn with being called up into the militia. Similarly, when waterside workers refused to unload a shipment of soda ash unless they received an additional two shillings an hour, Curtin instructed naval ratings to do the work.44 As well, from within his own government, the pugnacious Minister for Labour, Eddie Ward, was pressing Curtin to use the war emergency to nationalise basic industries.45 Such demands put Curtin in an impossible position, as they were doubtless intended to do. His political position made it impossible for him to accede to them but at the same time left him appearing to be weak in the eyes of the Labor Left.
After nearly two months of constant stress and ceaseless work, the physical and mental strain on Curtin was obvious to his colleagues. They urged him to take a break,46 which he did on 21 January, leaving on the night train for Adelaide as the Japanese intensified their attacks on islands to Australia’s north and Australian troops in Malaya continued to be pushed back towards Singapore. Before he left, Curtin was asked to comment on the Japanese bombing of Rabaul where an Australian battalion was waiting, staked like a sacrificial lamb. ‘Nearer, clearer, deadlier than before, the cannon’s opening roar,’ intoned Curtin, quoting from Byron’s Night Before Waterloo. Still trying to awaken elements of the Australian population to the danger that was besetting them, Curtin now declared that: ‘Anybody who fails to perceive the immediate menace which this attack constitutes for Australia must be lost to all reality.’47 This was a constant refrain of Curtin’s during these months, when he apparently believed that Australians were sanguine when in fact many were almost suicidal at the thought of a Japanese invasion.
In Curtin’s absence, his war cabinet dealt with Page’s message concerning the possible evacuation of Singapore which they described in a cable to Churchill on 23 January as constituting ‘an inexcusable betrayal’. Although sent under Curtin’s name, these strong words were probably penned by Evatt. They had the desired effect on Churchill of changing his strategy, with a division of British troops, which had been destined for Burma, being sent to Singapore instead, where they arrived in time to be captured by the Japanese. Churchill never forgave Australia for pressuring him to send these troops into what he knew would be almost certain capture.48
Curtin arrived in Perth on 24 January where he was met by his wife and daughter and a large crowd of cheering supporters. He had received a similar reception on his arrival in Adelaide, prompting him to wonder aloud, ‘Would anyone ever believe that they dumped me last time?’49 It was his first visit since becoming prime minister nearly four months before. He would be there for just five days and faced a round of speaking engagements and meetings with the State Government. His visit provoked controversy when a BBC report claimed that he was there on holiday, which an outraged Curtin claimed was ‘an absolute lie’. In fact, the BBC was simply repeating Australian press reports which had described the purpose of his trip as being ‘on holiday’ and ‘to see his family’. Curtin was upset at the impression such reports gave after his admonition to Australians about taking a holiday. Indeed, he had cabled from Kalgoorlie to the Iron Workers’ Union in Sydney stressing the need for war industries not to take holidays, as its members wished to do on Australia Day. He was also concerned that the BBC should broadcast his whereabouts to the Japanese. The imbroglio took on an element of farce when Forde then issued a statement claiming that Curtin was in Western Australia ‘to deal with urgent defence matters’.50
While there was sympathy for Curtin’s need for a rest, there were real questions about his timing and his choice of a location. In Curtin’s defence, Don Rodgers argued that there was nothing more that Curtin could do by this time to obtain additional reinforcements, or decide on plans for Australia’s defence, since all decisions had been taken and the defence plans were ‘complete in every detail and left no eventuality uncovered’.51 This was far from true, as Evatt’s cable to Churchill had shown. But Rodgers and Forde could hardly admit to Australians that Curtin was not in a physical or mental state to face the stress of those anxious times.
During his absence, there were demands for Curtin to show greater leadership in galvanising the nation. It was not sufficient for him to hector Australians about their easygoing or selfish attitudes. It was up to the Government, argued Sydney’s Daily Mirror, ‘to shut down hard upon everything it brands as waste, or torpid inertia, or wilful perversion in dispute’.52 Similarly, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail had been dismayed by Curtin’s repeated calls for Allied assistance and the appearance of fear that they conveyed. It called on Curtin to provide ‘leadership that will steady the nation, give it confidence, rouse the fighting spirit of its people, show strength to the enemy, [and] proclaim Australia’s trust in her own courage and faith in her Allies . . .’ With the proper leadership, Australia would be able to repel an invasion and ‘save both its soil and its soul and be a stronger nation because of the ordeal’.53
Along with his daughter Elsie, and a girlfriend of Elsie’s, Curtin was back in Canberra in time to attend the marriage of Fred Southwell’s daughter, Thelma, at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on 7 February 1942. The marriage was celebrated by Curtin’s near neighbour, the Reverend Hector Harrison. Curtin proposed a toast to the couple at the reception in the Masonic Hall and put his car at the disposal of guests wanting a lift to the station. He also invited a young woman who sang at the wedding to have morning tea at Parliament House. A few days later, she rode the eight kilometres to Parliament House on a bike borrowed from Thelma and was ushered into Curtin’s office. Chifley was also invited to share the tea with their nervous young guest, who when asked to pour, managed to spill the tea into their saucers.54 More serious events were being played out in Singapore where Japanese troops had pushed the Australian, British and Indian defenders out of Malaya and across the causeway to Singapore Island. On 8 February, the Japanese crossed to the island itself.
As Singapore looked set to fall, Menzies wrote to Curtin warning him against reinforcing the Netherlands East Indies because Australian forces would then become ‘further hostages to fortune’. Menzies was doubtless mindful of his own experience in agreeing to the Greek debacle in early 1941. He suggested that Australia would be ‘better off in this war by concentrating all available forces in the north of Australia to carry out a Continental defence’ rather than ‘an Island one’. At the same time, he stressed the importance of sending any reinforcements from Britain or the Middle East to Burma ‘to hold the Burma Road and maintain China’ while Australian forces defended ‘the life line to America’. He urged that Curtin’s military advisers consider these questions ‘so that a balanced view may be obtained and presented to the British Government’. Curtin advised Menzies that the Government had already done what he had suggested, observing that Menzies’s ‘evolution of opinion towards a policy which has long since been advocated by me, not without some opposition, is not without interest’.55
The 6th and 7th divisions from the Middle East, comprising some 64 000 troops, had been intended to reinforce the mainly Dutch defenders on Java and Sumatra. However, as the first convoy of troops was transferred into smaller ships at Bombay, it was clear that the Australians would be lost if they were landed in the Netherlands East Indies. Even the British commander-inchief in Java, General Wavell, suggested to Churchill on 14 February that the Australians should be diverted either to Burma or Australia. A copy of his cable was also sent to Curtin.56 The following morning, a Sunday, General Sturdee phoned Curtin from Melbourne to press for the troops to be brought back to Australia itself, and also to press for the return of the 9th Division as well. The Government’s accepted strategy of defending Australia from forward islands was now seen to be bankrupt in the face of the surprisingly formidable power of the Japanese. Australia itself was the only strategic base in which Allied forces could be massed for an eventual offensive to push the Japanese back from whence they had come. Although Curtin was inclined to agree with Sturdee, he was hesitant in demanding the return of the troops to Australia, simply suggesting to Churchill that such a course should be considered and that it was meant to be ‘fully cooperative’.57 That same day, as Singapore’s British commander, General Percival, surrendered the besieged city to the Japanese, Curtin spent the afternoon in a Canberra church.
The Reverend Harrison had taken advantage of Curtin’s presence at Thelma Southwell’s wedding to invite him to the reopening of a Presbyterian church that had been established by Canberra’s pioneers on the road to Yass and which had since fallen into disuse.58 It was on land leased by the Southwells, and Belle and her brothers attended the service with Curtin and young Elsie. Although he took no part in the formal service, Curtin was prevailed upon by Harrison to speak briefly afterwards. He reflected on how important the church had been in the lives of the pioneers, allowing them ‘to share one another’s troubles’, observing also that the ‘fatherhood of God was closely related to the brotherhood of man’. Curtin later confessed that it was ‘the hardest speech he ever had to make in his life’, with Harrison later recalling him ‘shivering among the presence of church people’. The Sunday afternoon interlude at the pioneer chapel had reinforced for Curtin the reasons for defending the society that these pioneers had established. It also marked a further step in his search for a religious faith that he would never recover. Previously, he had claimed that Christ could be found in socialism, rather than in churches with their ‘conventions of forms, rites, and ceremonies, the darkening of wisdom by meaningless words, the insincerity and smug respectability of churchianity’. Now he was at least prepared to sit in their pews and partake, albeit reluctantly, in their ceremonies. Stopping briefly outside the church to sign autographs for a waiting press of children, he was soon back to the business of war.59
Confirmation of Singapore’s fall reached Canberra on 16 February, sending a tremor of fear throughout Australia. It was ‘Australia’s Dunkirk’, said Curtin, and it would be followed by the ‘battle for Australia’.60 This meant, concluded the Hobart Mercury, ‘that the days ahead are to be hard, unhappy, and full of sorrow’.61 The fall of Singapore bolstered Curtin’s determination to have the Australian troops return home, which he now demanded of Churchill. For his part, though, Churchill was equally determined that at least one of the Australian divisions should be diverted to Burma to try and stop the Japanese advance towards India and to keep open the Burma Road to China. He enlisted the support of the Australian representatives in London, Bruce and Page, as well as Roosevelt, in trying to force Curtin to back down. Churchill reminded Curtin that he had allowed, after Australian insistence, a British division to reinforce Singapore rather than go to Burma. That division had now been lost. Australia, he said, was now in a position to contribute its division and save Burma. If Curtin refused, warned Churchill, ‘a very grave effect will be produced upon the President and the Washington circle, on whom you are so largely dependent’.62 But the dramatic thrusts by the Japanese towards Australia helped to steel Curtin’s resolve in the face of what would otherwise have been overwhelming pressure.
On Tuesday 17 February, Curtin travelled to Sydney for the public launch of a war loan in Martin Place followed by a meeting of the cabinet and, the following day, a meeting of the Advisory War Council. The stress of leading the nation in war, combined with working late into the night, brought him down again. An attack of gastritis almost caused him to cancel his launch of the loan. However, he pressed on, anxious to instil in his audience a sense of confidence during those dark days. Flanked by a military display of troops in their battle gear, and waving his arms about in his characteristic manner, Curtin called on his audience to confront the challenge of the war, reminding them that: ‘Australians!You are the sons and daughters of Britishers. You have come from England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland. There is, fused in you also, the best qualities of other races.’63 His duty done, Curtin was taken off to hospital to have his condition treated.
On top of the stress of the troops’ return from the Middle East was a decision that Curtin had made to establish an Allied Works Council to construct defence works, mainly in northern Australia. Curtin enlisted his old Labor mate Ted Theodore, now a business partner of the newspaper magnate Frank Packer, to head the council. Ward and Beasley were bitter opponents of Theodore and were not slow to attack him when he promptly arranged for Packer to be released from the army to work as his director of personnel. Against the background of Singapore’s fall, Curtin was able to convince his colleagues to approve the appointment of Theodore along with other extreme measures to win the war, despite Maurice Blackburn, now an independent Labor MP, arguing that they were ‘absolutely foreign and hostile to the whole of the theory, origin, genesis, history and tradition of the Labour movement’.64
Curtin was still in St Vincent’s Hospital on 19 February, with young Elsie at his bedside and surrounded by hundreds of goodwill messages,65 when more than two hundred Japanese aircraft appeared over Darwin. Many of their pilots were veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack and they unleashed a devastating raid that killed hundreds of people and wreaked widespread damage on the defence installations and on shipping in the harbour. Gladys Joyce was on Shedden’s staff and recalls being in Sydney receiving accounts by teleprinter of the damage suffered to shipping in Darwin harbour during the raid. Looking over her shoulder as the list of sunken ships clattered out of the teleprinter, Don Rodgers’s ‘face was getting longer and longer. “Oh, God,” he said, “Oh, God”.’ A list of the damage, with nine ships sunk and 23 aircraft destroyed, was typed up for Curtin.66 Meanwhile, his colleagues on the Advisory War Council were meeting under the chairmanship of Frank Forde to discuss the return of the Australian troops, with the conservative members pressing for them to go to Burma. Beasley left the meeting at one point, only to rush back in to declare: ‘The Japs have bombed Darwin! That settles it!’67 Curtin issued a statement from the hospital announcing ‘this first battle on Australian soil’ and claiming that Darwin’s defenders and civilian population had ‘comported themselves with the gallantry that is traditional in the people of our stock’.68
Shedden later claimed that government ministers ran about ‘like a lot of startled chooks’ in the wake of the Darwin bombing, while Paul Hasluck claimed from his ‘personal observation’ of government ministers, including Curtin, that they were ‘in a state of jitters when bad news came’.69 They were not alone. In distant Darwin, many of the defenders feared that the Japanese attack was in preparation for an invasion and fled the town, some not stopping until they reached Adelaide.70 Australians elsewhere also feared that the attack on Darwin could be the precursor to an invasion. Many Australians had plans to cope with such a prospect, whether it was to commit suicide to avoid rape and murder by the invading troops or to take to the bush to find sanctuary or a base from which to organise resistance. Most Australians, though, went about their business while preparing for the worst. The sound of determined digging in many suburban backyards signalled the construction of shelters to meet the anticipated air raids.
For Curtin, there could be a dire fate as a defeated leader at the hands of the invading army. His daughter Elsie was with him at this time and recalls that it added to the stress of his war leadership:
. . . I suppose really he could see what would happen if the Japanese had won, then they would have crucified him. I don’t think dad would have ever pretended to be the greatest hero in the world . . . I think it was a big worry to him, a worry in all respects.71
It was a mark of his courage that he did not shrink from the burdens and dangers that now confronted him. Curtin could have been making a personal declaration when he told Australians that there was ‘no more looking away now. Fate has willed our position in this war. From now until victory, fate and war are the total words.We accept the issue and follow our destiny.’72