Surrounded on All Sides: Menzies at War

On January 24, 1941, Australia’s Prime Minister Robert Menzies began a journey on a Qantas Empire Flying Boat that took him to engagements in some forty-six towns and cities through some twenty-one countries across the globe. It was an extraordinary trip—made against the backdrop of a second global war, which Australians had, regretfully, joined in September 1939.

Menzies was on a mission—but not to save the empire and challenge Winston Churchill’s hold on power, as historian David Day and the ABC TV documentary Menzies and Churchill at War have asserted. His was a mission to save Australia by saving Singapore.

Menzies had been away from Australia for four months by the time he landed back in Sydney’s Rose Bay on May 24. The absence would cost him dearly, but he was determined to make an all-out effort to bring British attention to the peril its dominions faced in the Pacific. This was a testament either to his inexperience as a leader or a faith in his powers of persuasion. He would have recalled, with some assurance, that Joe Lyons had managed a four-month trip away in 1936 and recovered his party fortunes within weeks of his return.

While away, Menzies had confronted a dogmatic Winston Churchill over the poorly defended British base at Singapore—a confrontation that left Menzies with a sour view of Churchill’s grip on the war’s direction. Menzies was also annoyed at the apparent insouciance of the British high command in decisions being made involving Australian troops. He also made a futile visit to Eamon de Valera, Eire’s head of government, in the hope of influencing him to modify his isolationist stance.

Menzies had then gone on to Ottawa to lock horns with Canada’s social democrat Prime Minister MacKenzie King over lack of Dominion representation in Churchill’s War Cabinet, and he held talks in Washington with Secretary of State Cordell Hull over the importance of retaining the United States fleet in the Pacific.

For all that, in May 1941, Menzies returned home empty-handed. Leaving Auckland on the last leg of his trip, Menzies diarised his feelings of repugnance and apprehension at arriving back among colleagues, writing, “If only I could creep in quietly into the bosom of my family, and rest there … Clouds & west winds over Tasman. The hour approaches!” Menzies well knew the acrimony and disloyalty he faced at home. While he was in Auckland, his colleague Percy Spender had communicated to Menzies from Canberra that the plotting to bring him down was well under way in the party room.

It is seventy-five years this year since Robert Menzies was sworn in as Australia’s twelfth prime minister on April 24, 1939. Not that you’ll hear much talk of this anniversary for the most successful figure in Australia’s political history. Most historians—along with members of the Liberal Party—have not been interested in the achievements of Bob Menzies Mark 1.

Robert Menzies, as a senior member of the United Australia Party, assumed the prime ministerial office after the sudden death of Prime Minister Joe Lyons. Menzies was a standout figure in the parliament, a prize-winning lawyer from Melbourne’s Selborne Chambers, capable of smart rejoinders, with a cutting wit and a broad-shouldered approach to politics at home and abroad. He would be ahead of his time in being Australia’s first truly internationalist government leader and prime minister.

Robert Menzies came to politics on a dream run, moving quickly through Victorian state politics to win the federal seat of Kooyong in 1934 and immediately become Australia’s Attorney-General—all by the age of thirty-nine. But the Menzies style of being a little too clever, and well connected in Melbourne business circles, alongside his tendency to quick-wittedly backhand opponents, and even colleagues he disagreed with, left Menzies with a reputation among ordinary voters for being aloof and unpopular.

In fact, more often than not it was his colleagues whom Menzies alienated, rather than ordinary voters from the non-Labor side of politics. He could charm a crowd at any microphone. Many colleagues, however, few of whom had the polish of book learning and the lawyer’s way with language, were frequently put out by the sharp Menzies quips.

Percy Spender captures this well in Politics and a Man:

At dinner with colleagues in Canberra, Menzies was in top form. A senator colleague present, who warmed to Menzies on the night, asked him why he was not more like that all the time. Menzies’ problem, said the senator, was that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. To which Menzies had replied, without drawing breath, “And pray, what do you think I am doing now?”

Spender goes on to write that the senator (possibly Senator Foll) was at the forefront of moves to force Menzies to resign in August 1941.

Robert Menzies’s accession as Australia’s twelfth prime minister came with a great deal of public drama—the sudden death of Lyons, a popular prime minister, shocked the nation. In the background, rivalries and tensions within the United Australia Party—in office since winning the December 1931 election—meant that the election of a new UAP leader was fraught with petty division. Menzies won only narrowly against the ageing Billy Hughes.

Added to this was the bitter animosity of acting Prime Minister and Country Party leader Earle Page, who believed Menzies’s resignation from cabinet in March 1939 had shown disloyalty to Lyons in his last months. It would be some time before the Country Party accepted Menzies’s terms to return to a coalition government.

Technically, then, in April 1939, Menzies took the reins of a minority government. When the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, asked the new prime minister how long he thought his administration would last, Menzies replied—tongue-in-cheek—“six weeks”.

It is easy to look back in hindsight at Australia’s part in the Second World War and think it was all a matter of standing firmly against fascist overlords in Europe and the Pacific. That was not how it felt at the time. In fact, the overriding emotion in most people at the end of the 1930s was an aversion to any suggestion that Australia’s young men would don the khaki and set foot on the bloody battlefields their fathers and uncles had faced. The feeling was shared across the Western world.

This explains the policy of appeasement through the late 1930s, and international attempts to mollify and negotiate with Hitler until the very end. Even on the day war was declared in Downing Street hopes remained in Whitehall that Hitler would pull out of his attack on Poland, and war might still be averted. Alexander Cadogan’s diaries at the Foreign Office tell the story in dramatic detail.

In Australia, the Labor Party was one step removed from appeasement in its isolationist stance. Critics who pour scorn on the appeasers—Chamberlain in Britain, Lyons, Bruce and Australia’s leadership generally at the time—ignore the fact that Labor had no interest in Europe’s woes, arguing that it was not Australia’s affair.

In a parliamentary debate in May 1939 on Australia’s need to prepare for war, Labor leader John Curtin argued a strong pacifist position, opposing any Australian involvement in a war with Nazi Germany. In his view, home defence was Australia’s only priority. Those, he said, who were concerned with fighting Hitler were in fact opposed to peace. He went on to attack vested interests involved in “war-making”.

Against this backdrop, the Menzies government pushed on with legislation to draw up a National Registration Bill and the creation of a Department of Supply in readiness for a war economy. During the debate in parliament, Labor spokesmen stressed again and again that the nation’s priorities were social—and that the government’s priority should be to make up to ordinary Australians for the lean years of the 1930s. The government passed its National Registration legislation, even after objections from several Country Party colleagues. While John Curtin would eventually support National Registration, Labor voices continued to reflect a great divide in a nation not prepared for war.

When Menzies referred to his declaration of war, on September 3, 1939, as his “melancholy duty” he reflected a community mood—one that would see the Labor Party criticise the embarkation of Australian troops to Europe and the Middle East from January 1940. Curtin was shackled not only by his divided party in New South Wales but also by the influence of Left faction support for the Soviet Union, in spite of the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, which lasted until June 1941.

At the New South Wales annual state conference at Easter 1940, for example, a motion was forced through known as the “Hands off Russia” resolution—absolving the Soviet Union of any blame for the war against the Allies. Only during the September 1940 federal election campaign, as he sought to capture swinging votes, did Curtin begin to unambiguously support the war effort—as if he had never opposed the embarkation of Australian troops for the Middle East.

During his wartime prime minister years, Menzies tried but failed to form a national government. Curtin feared Labor would split even further in any national coalition. Menzies had offered to serve under Curtin in such a government.

Australia’s war did not begin with Japan, despite what many Labor-leaning historians might leave you thinking. On January 5, 1940, half a million Australians lined Sydney’s streets to farewell 6000 troops embarking for the Middle East. Whatever their misgivings about another global war, Australians were with their lads from the start to the end.

Newspapers reported Hitler and his Nazi regime as the dark enemy. Over the following eighteen months they editorialised strongly for the Menzies government to be more jingoistic in its approach to overseas commitment. Yet, for Australian historians like Stuart Macintyre, the Menzies government was selling out Australians by relying too heavily on Britain. Macintyre labels Australia’s commitment to Britain in its 1940-41 theatres of war a “lethal form of defence on the cheap”, as if no defence preparedness was being made at home. Macintyre totally ignores Australia’s contribution to the wider world conflict and to the setting in place of the architecture for a country at war under the Menzies administration during 1940-41.

Frederick Shedden, Defence Department chief under both Menzies and Curtin, has written that, on taking office, the ability of Curtin:

to have the Defence platform of the Labor Party amended, could not have been immediately effective but for the foundations laid by the Defence Programs of the preceding United Australia Party governments. Curtin generously acknowledged the inheritance he had received.

The Macintyre thesis about lack of defence at home from 1939 to 1941 also ignores Australia as a dominion of the British Empire. At the time, England stood alone against Hitler, except for its dominions’ support. There was no guarantee before June 1941 that Hitler would not take London as he had taken Paris. A Britain under German control meant a British Empire under German control. Australia’s part in the defence of Europe in 1940-41 was very much part of the defence of Australia.

Through 1940 and 1941, Australians stood with the Allied commitment against Hitler and Mussolini, dictators supported for most of this time by the Soviet Union. And Singapore remained in British hands. In North Africa and Palestine, in Greece and Crete, Australian forces were a vital part of Britain’s stand against Hitler. Australians won victories in North Africa against the Italians in early 1941 before being temporarily forced back by the Germans, while in Greece and Crete they were forced to evacuate. In Tobruk, 14,000 Australians held fast against the Germans from April to August 1941. And in June and July 1941, Australians played a key role in defeating the Vichy French in Syria—for Jewish settlers in Palestine, Australians were enormously important.

Between January 1940 and August 1941, Menzies and Australia’s representatives in London argued the case for Britain to strengthen its defences in the Pacific. A country of Australia’s capacity was never going to be able to defend itself alone against the Japanese.

When the Labor Party condemned the UAP’s lack of preparedness for war, Menzies and his colleagues could only reflect on how Labor had opposed defence spending during the financially precarious 1930s. Menzies’s trip to the UK in early 1941 must be viewed in this context.

The 1940 federal election left the UAP in power—perilously dependent on the support of two conservatively inclined independents. One, Arthur Coles, joined the UAP briefly before Menzies’s resignation a year later. But the election also saw the entry into federal politics of Labor’s Bert Evatt, who would stir Curtin from then on—Evatt wanted a post in government, whatever it took. And a collapse of the Menzies government seemed a good start.

Australian troops had been abroad nearly a year as Menzies planned his trip to the UK in late 1940. Worries dogged him. Australian troops posted so far away needed visiting to gain a reliable briefing on their conditions and command. The lack of attention from Whitehall towards Singapore was also a concern, as well as the consideration, or lack of it, given to Australian commanders by their British High Command. Added to this were matters of trade and manufacturing opportunities for Australia in a wartime economy stretched by the burdens of expenditure and the interruption to trade routes. And there was the problem of a lack of ships for Australia’s rural exports, especially wheat.

In late 1940, Menzies crossed swords with Churchill after the Free French, with the support of the British, lost Dakar to the pro-German Vichy French in September 1940. Menzies had received no advice of developments there except what he had read in newspapers when it was all over. He felt humiliated. Churchill did not take the criticism well and gave Menzies a veiled dressing down. But the precedent worried Menzies in relation to Australian troops in the Middle East. What faith could he have that official information he received reflected the true situation?

As he left Australia, Pattie Menzies warned her husband he would last six weeks on his return if he disappeared to Europe in his quest to face Churchill. While he was there she cabled him twice to warn him to come home early. Instead, Menzies prolonged his time in the UK. In mid-April, talks on aircraft manufacture were going well—and a deal was within reach. He must not leave. Later, the hope that he might still prevail on Churchill, directly or through others, about British commitments to the Pacific, kept him in Britain.

Menzies was warmly received in Britain. Newspapers carried his speeches and he published a small booklet of them before he left for home. To the press he was good copy, and a number of malcontents in the Conservative Party duchessed him in the hope he would continue to challenge Churchill at War Cabinet meetings. For all that, in Menzies’s deteriorating relations with Churchill there is no evidence of anything more than irritation at not being able to persuade a man who saw Australia’s safety in its distance from the action and believed Japan could still be either appeased or contained.

Churchill had far more pressing priorities. Britain faced invasion by Germany; France had fallen and the USA still opposed entering the war. As Menzies delayed his departure for the USA, the Allied Greek campaign fell apart. While Menzies focused increasingly on Churchill, Churchill’s focus was entirely on Roosevelt. Roosevelt had assured Americans in the 1940 presidential election campaign that no American soldier would be enlisted to fight Europe’s wars.

David Day’s thesis that Menzies had travelled to London hoping to become a possible replacement for Churchill is, as Lord  Carrington told me in January 2013, “the most absurd story”. But, of course, it is one inspired by the Labor-leaning imagination that assumed Menzies was an Anglophile—not really an Australian. In the David Day and ABC TV assertions about Menzies in 1941, there is no evidence whatsoever for these claims. Moreover, whatever Menzies’s enjoyment of the intellectual and political depths of his Whitehall experience, it is inconceivable that he could ever have imagined such a move.

The UAP/Country Party collective that welcomed Menzies back to Australia was infested with egos and malcontents alongside some very nervous ministers who saw their chances of retaining government sliding away.

A cabinet reshuffle in July further alienated Menzies’s colleagues Bill McCall, William Hutchinson and Charles Marr, who had worked to undermine Menzies over two years; there were damaging leaks to the media. The Japanese advance into Indo-China, threatening Thailand, inspired a press campaign for Menzies to return to London to appeal to the War Cabinet and Churchill for direct support for Singapore. Labor would not agree to his going. The rumours of Menzies’s imminent demise ran thick and fast in press and chattering circles.

Finally, at a meeting in Canberra on August 26, Menzies placed his fate in the hands of his cabinet colleagues, asking them for frank assessments of his leadership. After hearing around half of the cabinet speak for a change in the leadership, Menzies went home for dinner with his wife, where they agreed he should resign. Country Party leader Artie Fadden was elected leader of the government at a joint party meeting on August 28. For the dramatic moments I’ll leave you to read Menzies at War—including the personal account Menzies wrote a few days later that has never been published before.

In summary, I shall just say this. The fate of the first Menzies prime ministership has for too long dominated the legacy of Menzies Mark I. The success of Menzies Mark II, after 1949, has not helped to redeem that legacy either.

But the record of the first Menzies governments is not to be underestimated. Could any other leader in Australian politics have managed such a fractious parliamentary team, against a backdrop of mixed public feelings and apathy for the war effort among so many, while pushing on to revamp government for an all-out war administration and, in less than two years, build and equip a military force that included an Australian air force?

No wonder John Curtin made his gratitude known.