14

War

Throughout its campaign against fascism and war, the Communist International remained mistrustful of the intentions of the non-fascist powers. On each occasion that Germany, Italy or Japan committed a new act of aggression, the governments of Britain, France and the United States failed to resist. The reasons for British and French appeasement of the dictators, and American isolationism, escaped the intensely suspicious Stalin: he was convinced that the capitalist statesmen wanted to manoeuvre Germany into war with the Soviet Union. The Munich agreement of September 1938 intensified his mistrust. In response to a German threat of war, the British and French heads of governments met there with Hitler and Mussolini, and ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Germany, this in spite of Soviet support for the Czechs. Hitler’s assurance that he would respect what was left of Czechoslovakia was speedily broken in the new year, yet Britain and France continued to resist proposals from the Soviet Union for a mutual defence agreement.

For similar reasons Australian communists suspected the government of their country. The UAP–Country Party coalition led by Joseph Lyons was at least as reluctant to confront the fascist powers as Britain was, and its failure to respond to the growing international crisis contributed to its collapse at the beginning of 1939. Robert Menzies, who assumed leadership of the UAP following the death of Lyons and became prime minister in April, was hardly a resolute anti-fascist. During his visit to Europe in 1938 he had aligned himself clearly with the appeasers of Hitler and Mussolini, expressed sympathy for Germany’s territorial aspirations and said there were ‘credit entries in the Nazi ledger’. He had no truck with fascism in English or Australian trappings, for he thought its florid ideology and illiberal excesses ‘not suited to the British genius’, but he was a selective cultural relativist, willing to allow the legitimacy of such right-wing movements and quite unprepared to extend a similar understanding to communism. ‘There is a good deal of really spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State’, he pronounced upon his return from Berlin. To the end, he hoped to avert war with Germany.1

Many Australians were suspicious of Menzies, and the Communist Party warned that he would use the war threat to suppress the labour movement. The great danger of a military build-up by a conservative government was that it could be used against the people and for purposes of imperial aggression against the Soviet Union. The party still argued that Australia should form part of a collective security agreement against the fascist Axis, but this would require a new, popular and progressive government, with voluntary and democratic defence forces, elected officers and representative committees of service personnel. In the meantime, the central committees instructed party units to send members into the military and civilian defence organisations.²

One of Menzies’s first measures was a National Register of all males between the ages of 18 and 65, which communists believed he would use for both military and industrial conscription. They were by no means alone in this view. The Labor Party opposed the legislation, and the ACTU declared a boycott of the register. With substantial opposition to the National Register from the Australian Council for Civil Liberties and other liberals, the campaign to refuse to complete the registration forms seemed fertile ground for the popular front and the party tilled it enthusiastically. Unfortunately, John Curtin, the federal Labor leader, spoiled the harvest. He disagreed with the boycott and obtained sufficient concessions from the government (including a register of wealth as well as manpower)to persuade the ACTU executive to call it off at the end of June 1939. This presented communists with a dilemma. The ACTU’s backdown could be challenged if three of the state industrial councils voted to continue the boycott, and communist delegates calculated that was possible, but such a challenge would deepen divisions in a labour movement already beset by argument between isolationists and supporters of collective security. Communist leaders concluded that the cost of intransigence would be too great since it would isolate the party, and reluctantly instructed members to desist. It was not a popular decision: the Victorians called it a retreat and wanted to continue the campaign, and Dixon had to go down to Melbourne to explain that ‘to lift the boycott was not in the nature of a retreat, but rather to compromise, which are two different things’. As for those diehards who wanted to burn their registers, Sharkey warned that ‘burning the forms was an expression of contempt and it would be used as a flagrant disregard of the law’. So it would have been, but was not that the very reason for a revolutionary movement?3

A poster produced during the campaign to boycott the national register in 1939. The coalminers are the victims, and Menzies the villain. (Source: J.N. Rawling collection, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU N57/2275)

This first switch of communist policy in 1939 was rapidly followed by another, this time determined in Moscow. Following his seizure of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Hitler turned to Poland. While Menzies declared that Germany had a case for sympathetic consideration of its territorial claims on Poland, Britain and France began negotiations with the Soviet Union to prevent German aggression against its eastern neighbour. The negotiations dragged on through the northern summer, hindered by the reluctance of the two Western governments to agree to the comprehensive defence guarantee that the Soviet representatives sought. The Australian party welcomed the prospect of such an agreement, which would vindicate its call for collective security and discredit the appeasers, but became increasingly concerned with the reluctance of Britain and France to conclude it. Then, in late August, came the news that instead the Soviet Union had entered into a pact with Germany.4

The Nazi–Soviet pact bound the two signatories to neutrality if either were at war. Ostensibly it was merely a non-aggression agreement, and welcomed by the Australian party as a contribution to world peace. As was explained in the communist press, the Soviets had won a great victory and forced Hitler to seek terms; the arrangement did not cut across a more comprehensive defence arrangement with Britain and France, and should in fact force these recalcitrants to join the anti-fascist alliance.⁵ In fact the pact included secret clauses that gave a free hand to Germany in eastern Poland and Lithuania, and to the Soviet Union in western Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and a portion of Rumania. It thus secured Germany’s eastern flank and left that country free, as in 1918, to direct its full military capacity to the west, only this time from a position of much greater strength. Why did Stalin do it? He was undoubtedly terrified that he would be left to fight Germany alone. It is also true that the pact confined the ensuing war initially to Europe, since the German agreement with the Soviet Union discouraged Japan from continuing hostilities with the Red Army in Mongolia past the end of the month—a respite that Australian communists stressed in their justifications of it. But this could hardly disguise the shock of such a sudden and cynical change. The Soviet Union, which had insisted that fascism was the overriding danger to world peace, now stood back to allow Nazi Germany to go to war. ‘The pact with Germany marks a certain change’, the Australian party central committee advised its state committees, ‘a change dictated by the circumstances of the situation’. Immediately it detected ‘signs of opposition amongst the masses to the pact’. On the night the news of the Nazi–Soviet pact reached Australia, J. B. Miles was due to speak in north Queensland; he was prevented from speaking and the noticeboard advertising the meeting was hacked to pieces with an axe. Among sympathisers and members the effect was profound. You might reconcile yourself to the pact and rebut the hypocritical recriminations of apologists for appeasement, but you could no longer see the politics of the left with quite the same hopeful idealism as during the years of the popular front.6

Further surprises followed. Britain and France declared war on Germany when it invaded Poland at the beginning of September, and Menzies announced that Australia was accordingly at war. The Communist Party immediately welcomed this declaration of war against Germany, and pledged its support for the defence of freedom from fascist aggression. In a statement issued to the press a few days later, it reiterated the importance of assistance to ‘the Polish people in their struggle for independence against the savage Nazi fascists. We stand for the full weight of Australian manpower and resources being mobilised for the defence of Australia, and along with other British forces for the defeat of Hitler.’ Yet within three weeks the casus belli had disappeared. ‘Poland has ceased to exist’, announced Tribune on 22 September, after Germany completed its conquest of the western half of Poland and the Soviet Union, exercising the secret clause of the Nazi–Soviet pact, occupied its eastern half. Henceforth there was no more talk of this victim of fascist aggression, but rather celebration of its liberation from domestic tyranny by the Red Army. That this liberation was imposed at the point of a bayonet and accompanied by mass executions and deportations was not disclosed in the Australian party’s faithful recital of Soviet propaganda.⁷

With the occupation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states and territory in the Balkans, the Soviet Union regained the land it had lost in the First World War. Furthermore, in a German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Demarcation, signed at the end of the month, the two powers cemented their bloody cooperation; Lithuania was transferred to the Soviet sphere of influence in return for Polish territory. Stalin’s initial justification for his accommodation with Hitler shifted quickly from a necessary tactical manoeuvre to an act of principle: the war became an imperialist war and then a war in which the Allies were the aggressors. His abandonment of the last vestiges of anti-fascism presented Western communist parties with severe difficulties. Both the French and the British parties were beset by internal divisions and mass resignations before they came reluctantly into line.8 The Australian party, by contrast, dutifully accepted each new instruction from Moscow without question. On 4 October the ECCI chastised the Australians for regarding the war as an anti-fascist campaign; on 6 October the central committee informed members of ‘a change in our tactics’ that called for peace. On 3 November the ECCI sent a new message calling for outright opposition to the imperialist conflict; on 6 November the politbureau complied and Tribune declared the war in Europe to be ‘an unjust, reactionary imperialist war’. From criticising the Labor Party in September for opposing the overseas despatch of Australian troops, the party insisted before the end of the year that Australians must have nothing to do with the conflict. Even such ready compliance did not satisfy the ECCI, which expected member parties to acknowledge their errors. Miles complied with this instruction, also with the explanation that the Australian party had been led astray by its anti-fascist fervour: ‘Instead of approaching the problem in a dialectical fashion, we did so from a one-sided anti-fascist fashion’. Blunt Sam Aarons objected that such self-recrimination would only ‘play into the hands of the enemies who have been endeavouring to create the idea of confusion’. Miles and Sharkey sought to convince him of its necessity, but this discussion resulted only in agreement not to press disagreements to open discussion.⁹

The bewildered loyalty of the Australian party is illustrated in the recollections of Les Barnes, a leading Victorian member. On the day that news came of the Nazi–Soviet pact he and Nattie Seeligson were due to address a public meeting in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn; they were dumbfounded and found difficulty in answering the numerous interjectors. A few days later at the party hall in the city the party speakers reassured the audience that the pact would secure peace, and yet at the end of the week Germany attacked Poland. During the weekend of 2–3 September Australians waited anxiously on the German response to Britain and France’s ultimatum, and yet on the Sunday afternoon Ralph Gibson again insisted that war could be averted. That night the state committee met at the Hawthorn home of Ted Laurie, a recent recruit. Most were convinced that war was inevitable but Ralph still insisted anti-fascist resolution would deter Hitler. At 8.30 there was knock on the door and Mrs Laurie entered: ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but war’s been declared’. There was a stunned silence as Les reflected how all that the communist movement had worked for was now lost. Ralph recovered first, gave a quick grin and ‘proceeded to develop a wholly new thesis’ that the war was an imperialist war between democratic imperialist and fascist imperialist camps and that the duty of members was to support the Allies. A month later, Richard Dixon came down from Sydney and the state committee agreed ‘we were on the wrong track’ and the war was an imperialist conflict pure and simple and the party must call for peace. As Barnes recalled, ‘It was a difficult year’.10

The remarkable cohesion of the Australian party was strained only by a further action of the Red Army. In late November the Soviet Union sought to complete its seizure of the spoils allowed it by Germany with occupation of Finnish territory on its northern border close to Leningrad. The Finns resisted and in fierce fighting inflicted heavy casualties on the Red Army before weight of numbers finally prevailed in the new year. The Soviet justification for this aggression, duly repeated by the Australian party, was that Finland was a reactionary vassal of imperialism to be used as a springboard for an invasion of the USSR, but some found such a patently contrived rationalisation of Soviet interests too much.¹¹ Jim Rawling, who was editor of the Movement Against War and Fascism magazine, World Peace, felt that it betrayed the principles of proletarian internationalism, a betrayal he traced back to 1935 when the Communist International began to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ capitalist powers according to the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. In mid-December the politbureau discovered he was about to publish an attack on the party in the January issue of the magazine and immediately expelled him. ‘An ‘‘intellectual’’, a non-proletarian, he is of the type that has frequently deserted the Revolutionary movement in times of stress’, explained Tribune. He responded with a statement of his criticisms in a leaflet, J. N. Rawling Breaks With Stalinism, and at this point seemed headed in the direction of the Trotskyist Communist League (as the ex-communists who had formed the Workers’ Party renamed themselves in 1938), which was active in its condemnation of the Communist Party for betraying Leninist anti-war principles. But within three months Rawling had transmuted his revolutionary internationalism into anti-communist patriotism with pro-war articles in the Sydney Morning Herald.12

Rawling refused to identify who had written the censored article but leading party members believed it was Guido Baracchi. He had resigned his post as assistant editor of the Communist Review in October when it supported the imperialist war, and was equally critical of the switch to advocacy of an imperialist peace. His deviation from the line on the outbreak of the war became apparent to the party class of University of Sydney undergraduates he took, one of whose members resigned from the class while the others were solemnly warned by Ted Docker that they should expunge their tutor’s heresies from their minds.¹³ After Rawling’s expulsion, Baracchi was called in and questioned at length. Yes, he conceded, he had lent books to Rawling but then he had also lent a book by Trotsky to Sharkey. Yes, he had corresponded with the excommunist leader Jack Kavanagh, who had written to criticise his tasteless sneers in the Communist Review at the fate of Radek, and yes, he had come to doubt the veracity of the Moscow show trials. Yes, he had had dealings with Jack Ryan, Gil Roper and other ex-party Trotskyist renegades, but he would like a fortnight to consider before he agreed that Trotsky was ‘a foul counter-revolutionary’. Yes, he had growing doubts about the party’s repeated tacking to the shifts in Soviet foreign policy, but he would like a fortnight to resolve his attitude to the party. Remarkably, he was granted his two weeks, and several weeks more while he composed a vast screed that caused his expulsion. To the announcement in Tribune in February 1940, and the charge of ‘political and moral cowardice’, he replied with his own open letter to party members that compared his record of forthright anti-war agitation in the First World War with the far more cautious conduct of J. B. Miles.¹⁴

Betty Roland, his partner, also left the party at this time. In a letter of resignation she explained that her disillusionment had begun with the party’s abandonment of militant industrial leadership several years earlier and that she had not attended branch meetings for some time, but the final break was still difficult for ‘the complete loss of faith is a very devastating thing’.15 The party responded by ordering the New Theatre not to produce her plays. Several other members also sent letters of resignation marked by bewilderment over the sudden changes in the party’s war policy, and some—including two Sydney organisers—simply dropped away. Party auxiliaries suffered substantial defections and the International Peace Campaign broke up in disarray over the Soviet attack on Finland.¹⁶

Most stuck to the party, if only because of the severe difficulties it encountered at this time. The announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact had brought angry criticism and there were assaults on communist speakers in the first few days of the war, but the Soviet attack on Finland unleashed a far more sustained hostility. By the closing weeks of 1939 organised violence against the party’s open-air meetings became commonplace. In Melbourne, for example, members of Catholic Action attacked the usual Collingwood pitch with stones and smashed the platform. Party members found a nearby open site and carefully cleared it of all missiles in order to complete the next meeting. In Newcastle the New Lambton branch moved its street meetings to the footpath in front of a shop with a large plate-glass window to avoid the same hazard. Elsewhere, members and sympathisers reinforced their security arrangements for public meetings that were repeatedly under attack.¹⁷

The principal confrontations occurred at the central sites. Trouble began in the Sydney Domain on Sunday 3 December, immediately following the Soviet action against Finland, when members of the audience took exception to communist justification of it. There were similar incidents over the next two weeks, provocatively reported in the Sydney press. Then on 24 December a group of soldiers seized and burned the party flags, the red one decorated with hammer and sickle as well as the blue one with the southern cross. The cause of their action appears to have been criticism of military recruitment, as Lance Sharkey made a public statement repudiating such epithets as ‘five bob a day murderers’ and insisting that the party wanted better conditions for the Second AIF. Even so, the presence of these young soldiers, on leave from their training camps and in search of excitement in the city, introduced a disturbing element. They were egged on by Harold Thorby, the deputy leader of the federal Country Party, which was already demanding the suppression of the party. Thorby was present at the Domain on the following Sunday when a crowd of 15 000 gathered to follow the action. There were twelve speakers, since the strain of addressing such a large audience without a microphone quickly exhausted an orator, and this time the party platform flew no flags. The appearance of the chairman, Norm Jeffery, was greeted with a shower of tomatoes and the singing of the national anthem. Party members responded with a clenched-fist salute and rounds of ‘Solidarity for Ever’. Repeated charges by soldiers in uniform brought eight arrests. There was further trouble on the first Sunday in 1940 when one of the speakers said that half the Second AIF were economic conscripts, but thereafter the attendance and the turmoil temporarily ebbed.18

In Melbourne a similar pattern of escalating violence reached its peak sometime afterwards, and the close similarity of incidents there and in other state capitals suggests that reportage from Sydney served as a model. On Sunday 11 February a group of servicemen alleged they too had been described as ‘six bob a day murderers’ (the base pay for privates remained five shillings a day but the government increased their allowances at the end of the year) and broke up a communist meeting at the Yarra Bank. Ralph Gibson wrote to the daily press to state that the party had the highest respect for recruits, ‘who, we believe, joined the AIF in sincere desire to defend Australia from fascism’. Notwithstanding his statement, men in uniform hooted, counted out and threw stones at communist speakers on the following Sunday until an all-out brawl ensued. In Brisbane it was again the war against Finland that provoked increasing opposition at the party’s Saturday night open-air meeting in the city, culminating in running streetfights on 10 and 17 February. By this time attacks on communist speakers in suburban and rural locations had become ubiquitous.¹⁹ Later, in April, as Hitler launched his western blitzkrieg, there was a further escalation. On the evening of Wednesday 3 April some 50 soldiers attacked the Communist Hall in George Street, and on the following Sunday a larger group besieged the building. That was followed by renewed attacks on the communist platform at the Domain until, on Sunday 26 May, more than 200 soldiers declared they would wreck the party premises unless mates arrested earlier at the Domain for assault were released. On several occasions soldiers down from Puckapunyal training camp invaded the city premises of the League of Young Democrats in Melbourne.20

The extent of antagonism towards communists is not easy to gauge. Party members recognised some familiar adversaries sooling the soldiers, who in any case were frequently in trouble during their Sunday leave in the city and found the party a conveniently legitimate target for hooliganism. Members of Catholic Action, which itself was by no means in favour of Australian participation in a European war until it became clear that the Soviet Union would not be an ally, also took advantage of the party’s anti-war policy to escalate attacks upon it. Clearly, these anti-communists were able to work on a substantial body of opinion that regarded the party’s opposition to the war as unpatriotic, its constant justification of the Soviet Union’s ruthless conduct as disloyal. Yet communists were far from alone in criticising Australian war policy. After their speedy invasion of western Poland, the German armies paused. While Britain and France rejected Hitler’s offers of peace in October, their armies made no effort to engage the enemy and remained behind their western defences; at the beginning of April 1940 the British prime minister declared that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’. While the Australian government enlisted 20 000 men in the AIF and prepared to despatch them overseas, its efforts to prepare the country for a sustained effort were weak and dilatory; shortly after he declared Australia to be at war with Germany, Menzies advised that at home it would be ‘business as usual’. He also ruminated in a confidential letter to the Australian high commissioner in London that he could see little to be gained and much to be lost by a war fought over a dismembered central European country for which ‘nobody really gives a damn’.²¹ The Labor Party accepted its own leader’s support for the war with limited enthusiasm, and still opposed sending forces overseas.

During this ‘phoney war’ there was substantial industrial conflict. In March 1940 the miners went on strike against an arbitration ruling that denied surface workers the 40-hour week won by the union’s earlier campaign of 1938. The communist leaders of the Miners’ Federation initiated the strike and the party put considerable effort into support for the miners as their stoppage continued into April and May; the ACTU also backed their demands. Employers felt no obligation to suspend their own hostilities: BHP, for example, took advantage of the coal shortage to retrench workers from its Newcastle steelworks, and thus get rid of a list of communist employees provided by the Commonwealth Investigation Branch. Menzies repeated his appearance the previous year at Wollongong, when he had insisted that the wharfies load pig-iron to Japan, with a trip to the Hunter Valley to explain personally that it was now the miners’ patriotic duty to accept the ruling of the court and produce coal. Not until 16 May was a settlement negotiated.22

Dissatisfaction with the war came to a head in the Labor Party at the New South Wales State Conference in Easter 1940. The conference restated the ALP’s opposition to imperialism, declared that the present war was ‘being pursued in the interests of big finance and monopolies’, and called for an immediate end to hostilities. In itself, this resolution merely affirmed the isolationist current that still ran strongly in the labour movement. A similar declaration failed by only two votes at the ACTU congress a fortnight later when Ernie Thornton proposed it; but it was accompanied at the ALP State Conference by a further resolution drafted by the three leading communist members of the New South Wales Labor Party, Lloyd Ross, Jack Hughes and Bill Gollan. By 195 votes to 88, the conference resolved its additional opposition to ‘any effort of the anti-Labor government to change the direction of the present war by an aggressive act against any other country with which we are not at war, including the Soviet Union’. This ‘Hands Off Russia’ resolution, as it became known, brought a storm of criticism. Lang immediately reformed his own anti-communist Labor Party, which once again divided the federal parliamentary ranks. The Federal Executive of the ALP ordered the resolution be struck from the records and in August suspended the New South Wales executive. The ousted executive in turn established its own State Labor Party, known as the Hughes–Evans party after its two best known members. While it retained a substantial following, the State Labor Party lacked any parliamentary representation and even communist unions such as the ARU, the FIA and the miners, failed to affiliate to it. Meanwhile the party reverted to the language of the Third Period in its denunciation of the ‘social fascist’ Labor Party. The conclusion is inescapable that Australian communists’ subservience to Stalin’s wartime foreign policy undid all the gains they had made in the Labor Party with the anti-fascist united front.23

Between the passage of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ declaration and the reconstruction of the ALP in New South Wales, and between the beginning of the miners’ strike and its abandonment, the course of the war changed completely. In April Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway, in May he advanced into the Low Countries, in June France capitulated. Henceforth Britain stood, with its dominions, alone. In the east Stalin again took advantage of the Nazi activity to occupy the Baltic states and the Romanian provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia. The phoney war had ended, a fight for survival took its place, and all talk of peace ended. Australian communists had made some headway in the early months of 1940 with their denunciation of the war, their industrial campaigns and criticism of war profiteering. From the middle of the year the environment was far more hostile.

At the outbreak of the war, when the government armed itself with sweeping powers under a National Security Act, Menzies gave assurances that political freedom would be sacrosanct. A number of local councils quickly introduced prohibitions on communist meetings, arrests and prosecutions under state laws increased, plainclothes agents became more common at party meetings, but in general Australian communists were permitted to continue their usual activities. Apart from imposing a ban on flags in the Domain, the non-Labor government of New South Wales resisted calls to prohibit communist gatherings there, and for the most part the police quelled the disturbances even-handedly. The Queensland Labor government was perhaps the most intolerant with its threat to ban public meetings unless the party undertook to cease all ‘anti-British’ statements. By comparison with France, which had speedily arrested communist deputies and banned protests, the measure of civil liberty preserved here was considerable. In January 1940 Menzies called a conference of all state police commissioners, the heads of the intelligence sections of the three armed forces, and H. E. Jones of the Investigation Branch. The military intelligence services wanted the suppression of the Communist Party. Apart from the communist anti-war propaganda and discouragement of enlistment, they alleged there was a concerted attempt to infiltrate the armed forces, weaken morale and undertake sabotage and espionage.24

There is no doubt that the Communist Party directed members to enlist. This tactic had begun well before the outbreak of war and was linked to the party’s campaign to democratise the armed forces so that they could not be used against the left. In this endeavour it had little success. A group of communists was formed in the navy and struck for better conditions shortly before the war, but the leader turned out to be a security agent. Far from infiltrating the senior service, in the late 1930s the party served as an escape route for naval ratings who wished to terminate their long term of enlistment: since possession of communist literature was an offence punished by discharge, a regular trickle of disenchanted ratings passed through the Anvil bookshop in Sydney. A number of members joined the Second AIF upon its formation, for at that point the party actively supported the war effort, but they were usually discharged as soon as they were identified as communists; one in Melbourne got as far as the embarkation wharf before he was sent home. ‘Don’t be confused if the man you are asked to keep an eye on is outwardly a good soldier’, the Military Manual for Dealing with Subversion in the Armed Forces warned. ‘The Communist Party doesn’t pick fools or known bad characters for their agents.’²⁵

Once the party turned from support to opposition to the war, open enlistment ended and in any case there was a slackening of recruitment as by this time the army had largely filled its modest initial quota of trainees. Henceforth the party press began to publicise the poor conditions of the training camps and the dissatisfaction of the men. A subsequent defector has claimed that as branch secretary he was instructed to select a member for a revolutionary nucleus in the armed forces, and that these infiltrators attended a special party school where they were taught to stir up trouble, nurture incipient mutiny and encourage desertion. There is no evidence of any such instruction, and in any case the communists in uniform needed no special training in the agitation they fostered in the summer of 1939–40. Rather, they took up the issues of pay and conditions precisely as they would have done in civilian employment and the effect of such trade union tactics, which secured improvements in food, clothing, leave and wet canteens, seems to have been a reduction rather than an increase in discontent.26

There is no evidence of sabotage.²⁷ As for the accusation of espionage, there is the substantial and in my judgement persuasive evidence of radio traffic between Moscow and a KGB officer in the Canberra embassy of the Soviet Union from 1943 onwards that reveals a senior member of the party was collecting political and military intelligence for the KGB. But that embassy was not established in 1940, when the available means for sending information from Australia to Russia were still rudimentary. For that matter, none of the Australian communists who are known to have entered the armed forces in 1939 occupied ranks that would have given them access to any significant military intelligence.²⁸

The Commonwealth Investigation Branch was not persuaded by the military claims and the report of the security conference recommended a strengthening of controls rather than a complete prohibition that would merely provide communists with additional publicity. Menzies thought the report superficial but accepted its recommendations. In early February his government acquired power under the National Security Act to call up newspaper copy before publication; two days later it ordered the editor of the Victorian communist paper, the Guardian, to submit copy for inspection.²⁹ The prime minister was pressed to do more when he reformed his government in March 1940 to take in the Country Party. Both the leader of the Country Party, Archie Cameron, and his deputy, Harold Thorby, argued publicly for a ban on communist activity. In early April the government prevented the broadcast by radio station 2KY of No Conscription, a play by Rupert Lockwood. The first meeting of the new coalition Cabinet resolved to close the communist press. Under regulations issued on 23 April 1940 the government strengthened its powers of censorship: communist publications were already prevented from reporting on the war, and henceforth they were not to comment on industrial disputes. So sweeping was the censor’s blue pencil that the May issue of the Communist Review appeared with the Sermon on the Mount as the principal article: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ was its only reference to the war, while publication of Henry Lawson’s ‘Faces in the Street’ was deemed too inflammatory. Shortly afterwards, the government ordered eight communist newspapers and journals (as well as the Trotskyist Militant) to cease publication and instructed five union papers to remove communists from all editorial positions or suffer the same fate. On the same day the government acquired the power to prevent known communists from holding union office. On 27 May cabinet resolved to declare all communist organisations illegal.30

In answer to a parliamentary question that day, the prime minister said that he anticipated being able to make a statement on the matter within 24 hours. In fact it took more than a fortnight to alert the state premiers so that their police forces could prepare to take action, and the necessary regulations under the National Security Act were not promulgated until 15 June. They allowed the government to declare illegal any organisation it deemed to be ‘prejudicial to the defence of the Commonwealth or the efficient conduct of the war’, to confiscate its property, prevent it from raising funds or holding meetings, and prosecute anyone in possession of its publications. In the meantime the party leaders, advised by a worker in the government printing office and by police sympathisers, completed preparations begun sometime earlier. On 11 June the central committee ordered local officials to issue no more dues stamps and remove the party name from receipt books; all members were to destroy their membership cards and ‘sentiment must not be allowed to interfere in the carrying out of these instructions’.³¹

On the night of Saturday 15 June 1940 police raided the party’s offices and the homes of all known members. They took away truckloads of documents, books and pamphlets from the national office in Sydney, and the Melbourne and Brisbane state offices. All assets were confiscated, the presses, the furniture, everything. The operation involved simultaneous searches of hundreds of addresses in every state and every major town in the country—there had probably never been a police activity of this kind on the same scale—and was inevitably attended by slips and mishaps. Bill and Marie Gollan were living in Cessnock and had burned all papers, but their sister-in-law arrived with a copy of the illegal Tribune, which had to be smuggled out to the privy. In Queensland Ted Bacon was not at home when the police called early on the Sunday morning. The caretaker of his block of flats told them he was at Mass, then replaced the incriminating books on Ted’s shelves with his own westerns. The police also descended on the state tax office, where Bacon worked, and wanted to take the contents of his desk, but were sent away by the horrified office head. Laurie Aarons and his wife had been playing cards at his father’s place on the Saturday evening and heard the next day that Sam had been raided. ‘Our noses were a bit out of joint’, Laurie recalled, because he and his wife had been overlooked, but he subsequently heard that the police had searched the shop in Banksmeadow, Sydney, where they had previously lived. The prominent communist union leaders were apparently immune. Ernie and Lila Thornton hosted a party at their place in Coogee on the night of the raid, and most of the guests went home to find books missing.32

In their zeal some police took the most unlikely publications and overlooked more obvious candidates for confiscation. Works by any Russian author, even Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, were likely to go, and the raid on the New Theatre in Sydney even netted Shakespeare among the 600 playscripts that were carried away, yet more than one member claimed to have passed off the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (which used the abbreviation CPSU on the spine) as a record of the Commonwealth Public Service Union. Mick Ryan and Jess Grant had hosted a party meeting in their home that Saturday afternoon before the evening raid and Jess had a correspondence book in the lounge room; when the copper picked it up it fell open at the divider headed ‘Housewives’ Organisations’ and he tossed it aside as harmless. Guido Baracchi had laboriously packed and carted his library to a safe address but Betty Roland lost the Russian-language contract for a production in Leningrad of her play A Touch of Silk. In Melbourne the police went systematically through Ted Laurie’s possessions and took a stapler. They knocked on the front door of Clarrie and Barbara Boyd’s house, politely lifted their hats, then took away every book with a red cover.33

Sometimes the police action was amicable, sometimes it was not. The tiny miner’s cottage of Annie and Sam Graham in Kurri Kurri, New South Wales, was raided at two in the morning. She had already stored the party material and left only a pile of Soviets To-Day for the police. The local copper had great difficulty in gathering up the heavy, shiny magazines since, as Annie appreciated, ‘they’re buggers of things to pile on your arm and carry’, so he asked if he could take them in a port. She angrily refused. ‘Look, there’s hundreds of men in this town haven’t had a job for years, but if they were offered your job tonight, they wouldn’t bloody do it. It would be beneath them to do such a rotten, dirty, bloody job as you’re doing.’ Eleanor Dark’s novel The Little Company has a defiant Sydney intellectual spreading ‘a veil of comedy over the whole ugly business’. He invites the police into his library, watches them confiscate The Wealth of Nations and pass over a textbook on dialectics (‘Not that, food’, the sergeant instructs the constable); but his companion is less sanguine, ‘conscious all the time of this democracy as a fraying rope, snapping strand by strand’ and aware that such raids were not always so innocuous.³⁴ In Queensland, where the Labor government took the opportunity to crack down on its left critics, the raids were less discriminate and more violent. In some country centres the police were vindictive: in Ballarat, Victoria they destroyed the hats of Ted Rowe’s wife on the grounds that they might conceal seditious material.³⁵

The repression was greatest in Western Australia, where an ambitious detective-sergeant took advantage of the national security regulations to anticipate the crackdown. His name was Ron Richards, better known as the Black Snake or Ron the Con, who would become deputy director of the postwar Australian intelligence service and chalk up a number of successful operations, including the defection of the Soviet diplomat, Vladimir Petrov. Richards used both bluff and cajolery to break down the defences of his victims. He affected a mutual understanding, hinted at the mutual advantage of shared confidences, switched easily from threat to promise. Not even his own colleagues were privy to his intentions. Before the outbreak of the war he had cultivated the friendship of Bill Mountjoy, the state secretary of the party, who accordingly regarded the instructions to prepare for illegality as unnecessary. A police raid on the party office in London Court therefore netted extensive details of members’ names and addresses. In subsequent actions, all before 15 June, Richards rounded up all the leading party members but Mountjoy. Arthur Rudkin, the editor of the Workers’ Star, was charged with publishing information that might be useful to the enemy, namely an article on gas masks based on information from a British scientist that had recently been classified. He was gaoled for four months. William Dean, party treasurer, was sentenced to six months for notes on gun emplacements on Rottnest Island. Kevin Healy, who replaced Mountjoy as secretary, got three months for possession of a party newsletter, as did Paddy Troy, a member of the state committee. Altogether, more than a dozen party members were arrested and convicted, including Jack Simpson, who was sent across from Sydney to take over as secretary after the initial raid.36

Outside Western Australia there were few arrests at this stage. The purpose of the declaration of illegality and the raids of 15 June was to disarm the party, to deprive it of capacity to oppose the war, rather than to make martyrs of its members. Stronger action followed but only because the raids failed in their purpose.

There is a tendency in the reminiscences of Australian communists about their wartime underground activity to exaggerate the effectiveness of the party’s arrangements. The central committee had repeatedly given warning of the need to prepare, to keep no unnecessary records, to install flatbed presses or duplicators in safe premises and build up stocks of paper, to break large branches into smaller cells and disguise meetings as social occasions, to avoid recognising members in public, and of various other precautions. Yet when Eva Bacon arrived in Australia from Vienna in 1939, she found Australian communists’ understanding of how to work illegally quite rudimentary. She immediately set down her knowledge of such activity as a sort of manual for party members in Brisbane, and one of them showed the document to a journalist, who published it in Truth. For that matter, the authorities’ enforcement of illegality struck a woman who had undergone the attentions of the Austrian and then the German secret police as ‘a complete joke’. The experience of her future husband, Ted, illustrates the national weakness. He had advance warning of the declaration of illegality from contacts—including, he claimed, Major Wake, the head of the Brisbane office of the Investigation Branch—yet on the night of the raids he had left an extensive library of Marxist literature at his home. The various stories of correspondence and address books snatched from under the eyes of the ignorant clodhoppers have a similar quality of naivety.37

The most comprehensive overview of how the Australian party fared as an illegal organisation is that of Wally Clayton, who was in charge of the arrangements. He was originally a New Zealander who later worked as a travelling salesman while serving as a party organiser for Len Donald in Victoria, where one comrade remembered him constantly coming and going on his motorcycle with instructions. In 1939 Clayton moved to Sydney to work as circulation manager for Tribune. Some time in that year, he has stated, he was called to appear before Dixon and Sharkey and told to take charge of the central committee’s preparations for illegality. He immediately set about arranging secret residences, meeting places, transport, stores, printeries, a vast apparatus of facilities that enabled the party leadership to function uninterrupted. He safeguarded the party’s records and funds, eliminated all attempts at infiltration, set up meetings for Miles and Sharkey, even arranged for them to receive medical treatment.³⁸ This triumphant account of a successful task was related comparatively recently, for Clayton spent much of his subsequent life avoiding publicity. He was underground from 1940 to 1943 and again from 1947 to 1954, and the habits of secrecy became ingrained. He was also pursued by Australian security and subjected to enormous pressure after 1954, accused of being the Australian spymaster who had gathered secrets from a circle of informants for the KGB. Clayton has never admitted these allegations, but their effects are apparent in his account of how he outwitted the security services and the police in 1940. He finds vindication in his sterling service during the party’s hour of need.³⁹

Clayton’s version exaggerates his accomplishment. He says that when he took charge of underground work, no preparation had been made; it had. He says that he had no guidance beyond an article in Inprecorr and had to devise the arrangements himself; the Australian party had circulated manuals that set out the basic principles since the early 1930s. He claims that he went underground well before the police raids; he was found on the evening of 15 June hiding in the lavatory of a party member’s house in Petersham with a copy of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.40 He presents a picture of tight security in which the only victims of official surveillance were some inexperienced and ‘very liberal underground workers’; in fact the conditions of party work were difficult and dangerous. Many members came to grief. Just how many is not certain. The commonly accepted figure of 50 convictions for offences against national security regulations is almost certainly too low: the Council for Civil Liberties recorded nearly that number of cases, and the Commonwealth archives contain files for many other raids, arrests and prosecutions of both prominent and obscure communists.

Even when elaborate preparations had been laid, they were imperilled by inexperience or carelessness. The principal cadres were to move interstate, where they would not be so easily recognised. Ralph Gibson planned to travel to Brisbane in a series of car and train journeys, but on the night of 15 June he almost ran into the hands of the police at the Melbourne offices. In Brisbane the printing press had been secreted on a poultry farm and Albert Robinson, the editor, turned up while the police were questioning the farmer; fortunately they did not recognise the interloper. Les Barnes had bought a flatbed press for use in Melbourne and carefully arranged for a carrier to transport it to its secret location; the carrier turned out to be a former printer who knew Les, and some time later the military intelligence came looking for him. These presses were troublesome items, partly because they were so noisy when operated and partly because they were such a magnet for the police. Even to move them was a hazardous business, as the Melbourne comrades discovered when they were assisted in doing so by a curious policeman. In smaller cities and towns, where everyone knew everyone else, secrecy was especially difficult. Barbara Boyd, who went to Western Australia as an organiser after the leading members were jailed, remarked that in a place like Perth it was dangerous to be seen lumping a Gestetner. The party took pride in the fact that it continued to produce its newspapers and pamphlets, sometimes defiantly sporting such publishers as T. Gracchus of Cato Street, John Fairfax at the address of the Sydney Morning Herald, or the Dimitrov Press at the offices of the UAP; but their publications appeared less frequently, in abbreviated form and cost a number of arrests. When the Communist Review reappeared after the press was reestablished in defiance of the ban, it boasted that ‘we were never so free as now when we have no freedom’, but this was after an interval of six months and in a greatly reduced format.41

After a publication was printed, it had to be distributed. Sale or possession of communist literature was an offence that brought sentences of three to six months, more frequently in Western Australia than in other states but sufficiently often to make it a risky undertaking. Even to post placards or paint slogans after dark required a team of three: one to hold the material, one to wield the brush and one to act as cockatoo. Lil Davis, a much loved battler of inner Sydney, was caught letter-boxing pamphlets for lack of this precaution. She was also placed at risk by the presence of a security agent in her party group. We know about him because he was detected—really, he gave himself away, since he arrived knowing no one, kept asking for the names of paper sellers, and most tellingly, he owned a car. This infiltrator was quickly turned out but others were more skilful in their camouflage. As a result the police were able to pounce on party meetings, even those disguised as picnics or parties, arrest the members and find incriminating material. A year after the party was declared illegal, Tribune still had to warn members that ‘many prosecutions are still the result of holding illegal publications which could have been passed on or otherwise cared for’. The party was, of course, banned from holding public meetings and speakers who appeared on some other platform might still be prosecuted for breach of the national security regulations. Those apprehended were commonly invited to enter into a bond to observe the regulations for the duration of the war. Phyllis Johnson’s refusal to do so when she was prosecuted for an anti-war address at the Domain cost her a month in Long Bay prison. Fred Paterson, on the other hand, did sign a bond when he was convicted for an anti-war statement made at a Townsville city council meeting.42

Not all of those apprehended were prosecuted and not all of those prosecuted were convicted, for the close scrutiny of lawyers revealed loopholes in the myriad regulations issued under the authority of the National Security Act, which the government in turn attempted to close with further regulations. The case of George Wallis, a leading Tasmanian communist, attested to the assiduity of the authorities. In May 1940 the police raided his Sandy Bay boarding house and seized a duplicator. On 15 June they again ransacked his room and took away communist publications. In October 1940, January and February 1941 there were further raids and following the last of the raids he requested, as was his right, a list of his seized possessions. He was then arrested and charged with living without lawful means of support, a charge the Hobart magistrate dismissed since Wallis had both money and a job.⁴³

One other offence put a large number of party members away—the offence of alien status. Communists were by no means the only offenders, indeed they were outnumbered by German and Italian settlers who actively identified with the Nazi and fascist regimes. The individual determinations whereby the Australian government interned several thousand settlers of enemy origin in the first year of the war were based partly on evidence of such loyalties and partly on a range of other kinds of political activism. Left-wing sympathies or even a record of involvement in a trade union frequently caused internment, despite the fact that such individuals were clearly opposed to the governments of their country of origin. That Italy entered the war just a few days before the Communist Party was declared illegal seems to have resulted in Italian communists being treated as doubly disloyal, for they were singled out for special attention. Many of these anti-fascist Italians suffered violence within the internment camps, and at least one was killed.⁴⁴

Two more communists were interned in 1941 in controversial circumstances. Horace Ratliff was a Gallipoli veteran and jack-of-all-trades; Max Thomas was an unemployed relief worker who had gone into the printing industry. They went underground in June 1940 and lived in a secluded cottage at Bonnet Bay, which lay on a tributary of the Georges River on the southern outskirts of Sydney, and used it both to produce literature and hold meetings. In November 1940 the police raided the cottage and charged the two men with possession of papers, a typewriter and a Gestetner. Both refused to give a bond to obey the national security regulations and were sentenced to six months hard labour, which Ratliff served at Bathurst and Thomas at Goulburn. Upon his release in May 1941, Thomas returned to his wife and children at Kogarah and found work on the Daily Mirror. On 14 June he and Ratliff were interned in Holdsworthy military camp, at the order of the minister of the army, on the grounds that they were active members of an illegal organisation and had refused to give an undertaking to obey the national security regulations. On 2 July Ratliff and Thomas began a hunger strike to draw attention to their case. On 19 July they broke the strike to give evidence in an appeal against the minister’s decision, held in a hospital where they had both been taken in a seriously weakened condition and tempted with chicken broth. The appeal was rejected and they resumed the fast. Their case was first publicised in the newspaper of the State Labor Party, and propelled by protest meetings outside the internment camp where POWs responded by singing ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’ in their own languages. The Council for Civil Liberties organised a petition for their release. A newly formed Civil Rights Defence League, chaired by Frank Dalby Davison and with Marjorie Barnard and Miles Franklin among its patrons, dwelt on the injustice. Unions staged a round of protest strikes. Eventually the men accepted the advice of the New South Wales Labor Council to abandon their hunger strike and were released when the Labor Council provided sureties for them.45

This, the only occasion on which the government used its full powers against individual party members, indicates the means whereby the party was able to carry on its work. The term ‘underground’ gives a misleading impression. Only a small minority of leading members actually went into hiding and even they would surface periodically as parliamentary candidates or for some other public occasion before disappearing once more from view. One member of the New South Wales police has recalled his Sunday afternoon duties at the Sydney Domain as a shorthand recorder of party speakers. He was instructed to follow Lance Sharkey, ‘and everywhere Sharkey spoke we went’. A superior taught him ‘fifty or sixty phrases in the Communist jargon’, which he duly transcribed, but no prosecution followed.46

The strike by Chinese crew of a ship carrying wheat to Japanese-occupied territory coincided with a campaign to boycott Japanese products. (Source: ‘Newcastle Morning Herald’, 19 October 1937)

The refusal at the end of 1938 by members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation at Port Kembla to load pig-iron for export to Japan brought on a major confrontation with the Commonwealth government. Three members of the union pose here in cheerful resolution with the subject of the dispute. (Source: ‘Communist Review’, January 1939)

A studio portrait of Katharine Susannah Prichard, a founder member of the party in Western Australia and the most revered of the communist writers. (Source: Prichard papers, National Library of Australia MS 6201/12/2)

Communists first achieved positions of national leadership in the unions in 1934 when Bill Orr was elected secretary of the Miners’ Federation, to be followed later in the year by Charlie Nelson, who was elected president. At the general council of the Federation in 1935, Orr is third from the right in the front row and Nelson fourth from the left. Between them is their longstanding rival and ally, ‘Bondy’ Hoare. (Source: Australasian Coal and Shale Employees’ Federation, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU K2434)

The Townsville party branch, June 1940. It was in north Queensland that the party made greatest strides in the second half of the 1930s, but the composition and demeanour of this assembly belies the area’s reputation as a site of footloose hard cases. (Source: Laurie Aarons)

The Friends of the Soviet Union became one of the most important of the party’s auxiliary organisations during the 1930s. This record of the Victorian state conference in 1936 shows the platform and the floor. (Source: Ralph Gibson collection, University of Melbourne Archives)

A mass choreography of Soviet power, the May Day parade in Moscow was the highlight of a visit to the USSR in the 1930s. ‘How long will it be before we will be witnessing a similar spectacle—from the GPO steps in Martin Place?’, asked an Australian delegate the year after this picture appeared. (Source: ‘Soviets To-Day’, September 1933)

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s visit to the Soviet Union in the winter of 1933-34 was overshadowed by the suicide of her husband back in Australia. Prichard’s account of the trip, ‘The Real Russia’, allowed none of the misgivings that Betty Roland claims she confided while in Moscow. In this record of an inspection of a collective farm, a boy shows her his model areoplane. (Source: Prichard papers, National Library of Australia MS 6201/12/2)

A demonstration in support of Ratliff and Thomas, location unknown but possibly outside the Holdsworthy army base in New South Wales. The demonstrators march line abreast in good cheer and are better dressed than before the war. (Source: CPA photographic collection, University of Melbourne Archives)

The great majority of Australian communists went about as before, more circumspectly perhaps, but with their identities and allegiance known to neighbours and workmates. Since all party activity was illegal, it had to be conducted in a clandestine fashion, yet the object of communism as a popular movement required that it maintain a visible presence. This objective was assisted by recourse to other organisations that retained their legal status. The Friends of the Soviet Union, for example, was never suppressed, though its monthly magazine was banned and other publications heavily censored. The League of Young Democrats remained a legitimate organisation until February 1941, and was then able to transfer its activities into the youth wings of sympathetic unions. New organisations were established, most notably the Legal Rights Committee, as surrogates for those proscribed. The party made considerable use of the State Labor Party in New South Wales and its newspaper, now renamed Progress, for the conduct of public campaigns. Most of all, it relied on its substantial presence in the unions. For all of its denunciation of industrial fifth columnists, the government’s war effort relied on the cooperation of key unions such as the miners, the wharfies, the seamen, railway workers and ironworkers, and it was loath to antagonise them with action against their elected leaders. These officers were exempted from the police raids on 15 June because, as one of them put it, there was ‘a sort of agreement that nothing could be done to trade union officials’.⁴⁷

There are no membership records for this period and the circumstances make it difficult to determine just how the party fared. From subsequent comments, it seems likely that the party lost some of its members and recruited very few new ones, though those who remained were spurred on by the conditions to work with a particular intensity. The frequently repeated statement that the outlawed party grew fails to distinguish between its extremely difficult circumstances as an illegal organisation opposed to the war and the subsequent change of fortunes when it supported the national war effort. Lance Sharkey later stated that there was ‘a drift out of the party’ in the first year of illegality.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, the heavy-handed repression seems to have allayed the doubts that many had felt about the bewildering earlier switches in party policy, and to have overridden anxiety about the military success of Hitler. Ralph Gibson has claimed that after the ban, public opinion became friendlier to the party, and there is some evidence for this. In federal elections held in September 1940 communists standing as independent candidates polled surprisingly high tallies. Fred Paterson received 11 104 votes (18.3%) in Herbert, and Gibson himself 5175 (9.1%) in Yarra. Others standing for the State Labor Party in New South Wales also did well: Bill Gollan 12 956 (25%) in Hunter, Rupert Lockwood 8555 (14.9%) in Martin, Jack Hughes 6211 (10.6%) in Reid. This election revealed growing dissatisfaction with a government that was beset by internal dissension, tainted by a record of appeasement and infirmity of purpose. This was the period, also, when the New Theatre presented its satirical revue, I’d Rather Be Red, to packed audiences for four months:

There’ll always be a Menzies,

While there’s a BHP

For they have drawn their dividends

Since 1883.

along with the confession of a censor:

Oh years ago I gave some dough

To the funds of the UAP,

But I suffered defeat in a certain seat,

So Menzies said to me:

‘You haven’t got the nous of a mouse or a louse,

Or the brains of a chimpanzee.

You weren’t even meant for parliament

So a censor you can be.’49

The Queensland elections six months later suggested a comparable antagonism towards the Labor government in that state, as many who had chafed at the compromises associated with the united front readily accepted the reversion to forthright denunciation of the Labor Party: Paterson, with 47.3 per cent of the vote in Bowen, narrowly failed to win election and several other party members attracted a respectable tally. Sympathy for a plucky underdog probably compounded doubts about the conduct of the war.50

If the conditions of illegality failed to eradicate communism, they pushed it into a narrowly agitational role and hindered any real consideration of strategy. A national congress was clearly impossible, and even central committee meetings were difficult to arrange. Messages had then to be relayed interstate by couriers in ways that did not allow for discussion or feedback. Communication with Moscow was also difficult since the cable service used to send or receive policy announcements in 1939 was no longer available, and at crucial junctures in the course of the war leading Australian comrades simply had to improvise their response. The one constant was that Stalin was right. Just as his pact with Germany had outwitted the imperialists and kept the Soviet Union out of the war, so a similar agreement with Japan in 1941 should be supported by all workers: ‘since the continued advance of socialism and the security of the land of socialism is in the interests of all toiling people, no genuine socialist can doubt the value of the pact’. The war was nothing more than a contest between two camps of imperialists and ‘the Soviet Union takes advantage of the conflicts between the rival imperialist gangsters’.⁵¹

For Australian communists this meant an absolute rejection of the war and a return to the extreme abuse of the Third Period against those in the labour movement who supported it. Jack Lang, John Curtin, even a ‘liberal flunkey’ like Bert Evatt or that courageous civil libertarian Maurice Blackburn, were once again ‘the Labor servants of imperialism’. Miles and Sharkey exhumed Lenin’s 1913 characterisation of the Labor Party as ‘a liberal party of expanding capitalism’, now turned into ‘a handmaiden of the warmakers’. The party again talked of a united front from below, rather than from above, and a people’s government that would restore peace. It continued to urge the replacement of the Menzies government by a Labor one, but only so that the treacherous Labor leadership would ‘expose itself in office’ and ‘hasten the end of reformism’. It constantly drew attention to the horrors of war, the needless slaughter and the rampant profiteering. Yet its slogans—‘Make the Rich Pay for the War’, ‘Strike for More Pay’, ‘Don’t Work Overtime’—were scarcely the stuff of revolutionary defeatism. Rather, they represented a remarkably conventional programme of industrial militancy. Conversely, the call for ‘A People’s Government and Peace’ was scarcely a realistic way of dealing with a German leader who was sweeping all before him.52

Indeed, the more closely the Australian party’s attitude towards the war is examined, the more stilted its conformance to Stalin’s instructions appears. It was not that it resisted the twists and turns of Soviet diplomacy, though it is noticeable that the Australians never suggested that the Allies were the aggressor, as Stalin himself argued in 1940. Australia was one of the most compliant sections of the Communist International in its acceptance of the dictum that there was nothing to choose between the two capitalist blocs since they were both equally belligerent, just as predatory in their treatment of colonial peoples, alike in their fundamental malevolence to the workers’ homeland. But to suggest that the Allied powers were no better than the Axis ones was not to favour Hitler, as Stalin did; it was rather to claim that the British and French ruling class had been hoist on its own petard. There was certainly a case to be made against the selective moral indignation of the Allies and the inability of the Australian government to provide genuine national leadership. There could be no justification for Stalin’s utterly unprincipled opportunism. The long-term effects of the party’s subservience to Soviet policy in the period 1939–41 would return in the Cold War to haunt Australian communists.

The immediate equivocations arose from the local attempts to suggest that in championing the interests of the Soviet Union, communists were also serving the real interests of the Australian people. Thus the CPA claimed that the two countries would both benefit from peace since each would avert the death, destruction and danger of invasion that war entailed. Its propaganda dwelt particularly on the threat from Japan. If the Australian communists presented the conflict in Europe as irrelevant to Australian security and of real concern only to conservative Anglophiles, it also warned that a Pacific war would threaten national survival. Hence the ambiguity of its criticisms of the war effort, with the persistent implication that the Menzies government was incapable of rising to the fascist threat. Even as Australian communists condemned the war, there remained a strong anti-fascist undertow, a conviction that the hypocritical appeasers would not, as well as could not, fight a real anti-fascist war. The term ‘fascism’ was dropped by Stalin when he entered into his agreement with Hitler, and generally eschewed by the Australian party, but its continuing presence in the minds of local communists is clearly discernible. Without the participation of the Soviet Union, Paterson argued early in 1941, the war was not against fascism but a contest for world domination by the ‘kings of finance and industry’.53

The strains of these rationalisations began to tell on some of the party’s leading unionists. Lloyd Ross accepted the twists and turns of 1939, took his turn on the Domain platform and led the debate on the ‘Hands Off Russia’ resolution at the New South Wales Labor Party conference in Easter 1940, but he found increasing resistance among the members of his state branch of the ARU to the campaign of industrial militancy. His own doubts about communist characterisation of the war as imperialist came to a head when Paris fell in mid-1940, and he held back from support of the breakaway Hughes–Evans State Labor Party. By August he was arguing that the labour movement had to take up the struggle against fascism and turn out Menzies for a Labor government committed to a popular war effort. In early September the party expelled him as a ‘“middle class’’ intellectual’ who had gone over to ‘the camp of the class-collaborators’.⁵⁴ Some time earlier Bill Orr had resigned his position of secretary of the miners’ union, finally falling victim to the bottle, and he was removed from the party central committee along with Mountjoy, the disgraced Western Australian secretary, and two other ‘deserters’. The president of the Miners’ Federation also fell by the wayside in the following year. As federal attorney-general, the seemingly ageless Billy Hughes had established a slush fund to counteract the efforts of the communists and promote industrial cooperation. Charlie Nelson and the president of the northern district of the miners’ union, who both accepted payments, gave an undertaking in early 1941 that the miners would refrain from stoppages in order to ‘assist Australia in the war emergency’. Nelson also had a problem with alcohol; the party observed that ‘No doubt Charlie got down to ‘‘fundamentals’’ in the bar of Parliament House’, and washed its hands of him.⁵⁵

These defections did not alter the party’s anti-war resolve and there is little evidence of defections among the communist union membership. Lloyd Ross was placed under considerable pressure from the left in his union. The executive of the Miners’ Federation repudiated the statements of Nelson and his colleague, and communist candidates replaced both of them in subsequent union elections. The wharfies and seamen continued to conduct industrial campaigns, while the ironworkers embarked on a dozen significant strikes between October 1940 and May 1941, with general success and significant increase in membership. In 1941 publicans in north Queensland even alleged that communists had organised a union boycott that forced them to lower the price of beer.56 The ACTU continued to suspect the intentions of the government, and Menzies was still unable to reach agreement with the unions for wartime organisation of industry. The picture that emerges is of ingrained antagonisms between an industrial labour movement with accumulated grievances and a government unwilling to acknowledge them and thus unable to secure their wholehearted support. If few accepted the communist argument that this was a war that did not concern Australian workers, they were not yet persuaded that it justified the sacrifices demanded of them.

The war continued to go against the British and Australian forces. In 1940 the Luftwaffe pounded British cities. In 1941 the Panzerkorps came to the rescue of the Italians in North Africa and drove the Allies back towards Egypt. In the same year the Germans swept down through the Balkans, and Australian communists once again reviled Churchill, the architect of the Gallipoli sacrifice of 1915, for his despatch of Australian forces to a bungled and costly defence of Greece. Now the master of western Europe, Hitler was already planning a further strike which could only be in the east. During the early months of 1941 Churchill warned Stalin that he was in danger; the Australian party construed his warnings as an invitation to Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, which was unthinkable. Even as German reconaissance aircraft flew over Soviet territory, it insisted that the ‘provocateurs’ would not succeed. The Red Army was invincible. The Soviet Union was not afraid of Germany, nor would it provoke that country. As late as 22 June 1941 communists described the rumours of an impending onslaught as ‘a compound of imperialist hatred of the Soviet Union, British plans to switch the war and wishful thinking’.⁵⁷

On that very day Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and the German forces advanced deep into Soviet territory. Before the end of the year, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour would open the Pacific theatre of the war and Hitler’s generals would be within sight of the Kremlin. With the attack on the Soviet Union, the war changed irrevocably and with it the communist war policy. ‘The Soviet cause is the cause of working people everywhere,’ proclaimed J. B. Miles, and called on the workers to rally to its support. The change was immediate and untroubled by any acknowledgement of past mistakes. ‘The Wise, Farseeing Stalin’ had anticipated all. On this unshakeable note Australian communism entered into a new era.58