Betraying Ourselves

 In the course of the recent political auction which produced our “hung” (“unhinged”?) parliament, all bidders were careful not to disturb one ancient Australian bipartisan tradition: no searching and insightful debate about the defence of our country.

How like us! One historical example will swiftly serve to demonstrate the characteristic quality and wisdom of our defence thinking ever since Federation: in 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany; Canberra chose that same year to slash Australia’s defence budget to the lowest level to which it had then sunk.

Such reflections are raised by a recent and most readable small book (The Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal, by Augustine Meaher IV). The author is American, and this may have helped to steer him around the political mendacity which now poisons much academic study of the history of Australian arms.

Augustine Meaher IV’s central concern is the fall of the Singapore fortress to the Japanese in 1942. It opened up vast areas of the Pacific to enemy incursion, followed by the bitter loss of our soldiers and nurses into captive slavery. Meaher demolishes the canard that all these disasters arose simply from British perfidy and betrayal, which threw an all-unsuspecting Australia to the Pacific wolves of the Second World War.

“Betrayal by the Brits” is strongly propounded by the prolific but often injudicious Australian historian David Day, and the notion has gained wide acceptance. But it is very largely false, just one more invention which stands shoulder to shoulder with all the other military myths generated by our overheated, hyper-nationalist writers from the Left. For example, they still propagate the total myth that the Kokoda campaign saved Australia from invasion; thanks to their efforts, the first Wednesday in every September henceforth has been officially gazetted as a day of remembrance and celebration of the “Battle for Australia”. Excuse me? When was that fought? And where? How very odd that not one of my old Second World War sailor, soldier or airman mates who served in the Pacific theatre can remember it.

From both Australian and British sources, Meaher describes the “Singapore Strategy” that was adopted by the British cabinet in 1921; it was intended largely as an imperial partnership between England and Australia. The British would create a formidable fortress at Singapore, and base there a substantial fleet of the Royal Navy. Australia’s role was to strengthen its capacity for its own home defence—no small task for a country where an industrial economy had barely laid foundations, and whose military thinking was little more than the incoherencies of muddled minds.

The manufacture of motor vehicles and of heavy ordnance was quite beyond us. Rifles, indeed, we could manufacture, and ammunition for them, but that was about the limit of our munitions capacity. An aviation industry to produce the aircraft needed by a modern airforce seemed no more than an impossible future dream.

The Army was divided, demoralised, and kept on financial starvation rations. Officers’ rates of pay were cut, and even Duntroon Military College was closed down “for economy”. Our Navy, though to some extent sustained in doctrine and standards by the tutelage of the Royal Navy, was small and feeble. The RAAF could hardly be said to exist, in the sense of being able to project warlike cover of our vital sea-lanes northward.

Britain honoured its side of the imperial bargain far more effectively than Australia. True, there were hitches and glitches, and work was even suspended for a year. Progress was not helped by the declarations of a pigheaded Winston Churchill, that he could foresee not the remotest likelihood of war with Japan.

Yet in the fateful year 1941 the Singapore base was opened, and a fleet including two battleships was cruising in the vicinity.

The base promptly fell to Japanese attack; the battleships, without air cover, were swiftly sunk. British shortcomings contributed to the Singapore catastrophe, but … “betrayal”? And what had Australia done? The answer to that question is “very little indeed”.

It is true that we had sent three fine infantry divisions to fight the Nazis in North Africa and the Middle East, and that most of the RAN was battling the Italian Fascists in the Mediterranean; true also that many young Australians were being sent abroad to be trained as aircrew under the Empire Air Training Scheme. But all this was a world away from the Pacific, where we actually lived. We eventually sent the larger part of our Eighth Division just in time to be lost in the fall of Singapore. We scattered some tiny groups of soldiers at isolated posts in New Guinea and certain south-west Pacific islands. Our senior Army command itself referred to them at the time as mere “penny packets”, and most of them were lost.

Between the two world wars, the skies were dark with war clouds. Consider: Hitler’s threats and aggressions in Europe; Mussolini’s barbarism in Abyssinia; the Spanish “civil war”—a bloody rehearsal for the main-act Nazi-Soviet bloodbath soon to follow; the League of Nations failing every test it met. Consider, above all, Japan’s rampage in mainland Asia—Korea, Manchuria and (above all) the Rape of Nanking, which murdered fifteen million Chinese civilian men, women and children. But what of such trifles, out of sight over the horizon? Surf was up at Bondi, and Phar Lap won his Melbourne Cup. She’ll be right, mate.

Australia did not lack warnings of what might become the shape of things to come. As early as 1905, with Federation barely out of its gift wrapping, our amazing traveller G.E. (“Chinese”) Morrison returned home, anxious to tell our leaders what he knew of Japan’s long-term intentions. He was brushed off, and went to England, where the Times appointed him their outstanding foreign correspondent. British cabinet members were happy to use his knowledge and advice.

In Australia, Edmund Piesse, a former intelligence officer with first-hand Japanese experience, published his Japan and the Defence of Australia in 1935. He earned little beyond rebuke, and was reduced thereafter to the pseudonymy of “Albatross”, writing articles for the Sydney Morning Herald.

The case of Colonel Henry Wynter was appalling. This studious and dedicated staff officer produced several highly professional analyses of Australia’s true defence situation. As if that were not reprehensible enough already, he gave lectures on them to members of the United Services Institution. Even worse followed; he published them in England, in the journal of the British United Services Institute. Sir Archdale Parkhill, defence minister in Australia’s conservative government, was outraged, and had Wynter disgraced and reduced in rank. Maliciously, he refused Wynter’s request for a formal court martial, at which he could have defended himself. Poor Wynter! He was deeply learned in his profession, yet had failed in one basic lesson: if there is one thing a politician hates more than being told something he doesn’t want to hear, it is the voting public also finding out about it. (I had the honour of knowing Wynter slightly, and it is pleasing to report that his career was later retrieved, and that he served with distinction as a general during the Pacific war.)

Neither side of politics escapes blame for the state of unarmed unreadiness in which Australia languished when the war began. All parties were heavily coated with some substance which (whatever it might have been called) was not glory. Our Versailles veteran on the conservative side, Billy Hughes, was actually chucked out of the Lyons cabinet for expressing some truly cogent doubts about the value of the League of Nations.

But Labor was worse. Prime Minister Scullin and his Attorney-General Frank Brennan opined that Australia should lie low with its head buried deeply in the sand; that way, enemies would not notice us, and would pass by. In 1924, the British government of Ramsay MacDonald announced abandonment of the Singapore project. Labor members in Canberra cheered loudly in the House. (The Baldwin government restored it the following year.)

Augustine Meaher, in a kind of desperation, concludes that Australia is a country which refused to grow up—an opinion which is not easy to refute on the evidence. Labor Prime Minister John Curtin (heaven knows, no sabre-rattler) struggled to manage the appalling difficulties of the Pacific war, against the systematic betrayal and undermining of his disgusting colleagues Bert Evatt, Arthur Calwell and Eddie Ward.

I write on August 25, the day on which three possibly demented independent MPs demanded of Prime Minister Julia Gillard (among other things) a full private briefing on national defence. And likewise from Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition. Unless Australia can, against the odds, develop a wise and broadly acceptable doctrine of national defence, all those hideously expensive state-of-the-art items of equipment we have ordered for the future will be no more than glittering toys left lying on the nursery floor of some spoilt kid.

It is a shame that such a good book was not better prepared for printing. The well-known American writer on Australia was Hartley (not Harley) Grattan; Australia never, as far as I know, had a prime minister Mr Stanley; John Rockwood Proud should be Rookwood. Any surviving old pilots who flew Spitfires will be amazed to find that they were submarines; it should be supermarine.

Cheerful Note for Conclusion: In his savage little group of poems “Epitaphs from the War”, Rudyard Kipling wrote the following one for a politician. I quote from memory:

I could not dig, I dared not rob;

Therefore I lied to please the mob;

Now all my lies are proved untrue,

And I must face the men I slew.

What lie can save me here among

My bitter and defrauded young?

Since Federation, I can think of the names of at least three ministers for defence upon whose tombstones that inscription would be inappropriate.