Turning Points

If the twentieth century could be said to have had any single decisive watershed, it was surely the Second World War; and if that war could be said, without undue exaggeration, to have had a single decisive time, it was surely December 1941. By then the pattern of the war in the West was set: Germany controlled almost all of Europe, but England was holding out, and the German armies were failing to take Moscow. In Asia the Japanese war in China continued to drag on, its always slender justification long lost to the world’s view by the bloodthirsty behaviour of the Japanese soldiery. But in that December came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the pattern of the war and of world politics, not to mention the position of Australia, changed overnight. One of the most important, if least regarded, aspects of these changes was Hitler’s decision, within a few days of Pearl Harbor, to declare war on the United States.

Until then, President Roosevelt had been in a painful and difficult position. The geo-political dangers to the USA were clear. If Britain were defeated and Germany achieved unchallenged mastery of the European continent, and especially if Hitler also managed to subjugate the Soviet Union, not only would political night descend upon Europe, but mastery of the Atlantic would fall into hostile hands and the United States itself would be endangered. Equally great were the dangers in the Pacific. If Japan proceeded unchecked with the subjugation of China and could establish a centrally organised Japanese empire from the Western Pacific to Xinjiang, in Central Asia, America’s entire Pacific position, even the security of the US west coast, would be threatened by a regime fundamentally hostile to everything America stood for.

But what could Roosevelt do when he was also confronted by a dominant isolationism and pacifism in Congress and public opinion? By December 1941 he had done much to aid Britain and restrain Japan. He had pushed the Lend-Lease legislation through Congress and declared that America would be the “Arsenal of Democracy”. He had cut American sales of iron ore and oil to a Japan that desperately needed these supplies. As early as January 1941—by which time it was clear that Britain would not come to terms with Germany, as many had expected—secret Anglo-American staff discussions began on the design of a combined global strategy([1]). Before the end of the year people close to Roosevelt were fairly sure that he had made up his mind to intervene at some point.

But it was the combination of the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler’s declaration of war—perhaps one of his most decisive mistakes—that not only mobilised America but at once made the European and the Pacific wars into a single global struggle. Until that declaration of war some people had thought it still possible that there might be a Pacific war and a European one, fought separately and with no necessary political or policy connection between them. But the staff discussions had already concluded that in any general conflict, Germany would have to be dealt with first and Japan later. In spite of some later complaints, it was immediately obvious that once Germany was defeated, Japan’s defeat would become inevitable, while defeating Japan first would leave Germany free to consolidate its hold on Europe, with all its industries and science, perhaps even to achieve domination of the entire Eurasian continent.

No country saw the situation before Pearl Harbor more clearly as the realisation of some of its oldest strategic and political nightmares than Australia. The Australian colonies had, almost from their earliest days, worried about the inherent vulnerabilities of a huge and potentially rich continent, with its small population of white people. Such fears were reflected in nineteenth-century harbour fortifications built for protection from the French and especially Russian navies([2]), but also in worries about the “yellow hordes” to Australia’s north. These fears focused initially on the Chinese migrants who came to work Australian goldfields but, by the 1900s, on the military might of a Japan that had managed, within a mere decade, to trounce both China and Russia in war. Either way, they were reflected in the White Australia policy which enjoyed widespread support, especially from Labor and the political Left, and was maintained for the best part of a century.

Reassurance could only come from close, if sometimes disputatious, membership of the British family and from assured British naval supremacy, soon supplemented by the beginnings of an Australian navy, in the oceans from, or through, which a threat might come([3]). That was complemented by economic reliance on a secure trading relationship, with Britain. There was also, from the earliest days of Federation, a pronounced desire to be on good terms with the United States and its navy, symbolised in the warm welcome gave to Admiral Charles Sperry’s “Great White Fleet” in 1908.

The machinery by which these and other aspects of external relations were managed was at first very simple. Indeed, “External Relations” meant nothing more than relations and communications with London, with a Britain that most Australians([4]) continued to see as “Home” until the Second World War and beyond, and which conducted the empire’s foreign relations on behalf of all its members. That was convenient for many reasons, not least the fact that London maintained a foreign service network that Australia had no hope of emulating. But more than cost was involved. London could obviously carry altogether greater weight than Melbourne in dealing with foreign states. Moreover, most of the states or colonies closest to Australia, including New Zealand, Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, were anyway governed, or strongly influenced, from Europe.

Not only that, but there was the Constitution. Within the constitution of the British empire, the treaty-making power belonged to the king, as did the power to appoint ambassadors or ministers([5]). For that reason Prime Minister Alfred Deakin’s letter of December 24, 1907, to the US Consul General in Melbourne inviting the Great White Fleet to Australia, to “[express] our sympathy with our kinsmen in their demonstration of naval power”([6]) was arguably entirely ultra vires. Two years later, following the US fleet visit to Australia, Deakin went further and wrote to Lord Crewe, the British Colonial Secretary, suggesting that the Monroe Doctrine should be extended to the rim of the Pacific, guaranteed by a number of powers except Japan. The British rejected the idea of anything of the kind without Japanese participation([7]). They were not going to jeopardise the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902. That had been sought, among other things, to enlist Japan’s weight in containing the Germans, whose East Asiatic Squadron was comparable in numbers, but superior in quality, to the Royal Navy in Eastern waters.

The issue of Australia’s freedom of international action did not arise again in a serious way until 1918 or 1919. The dominions, having sent independent armies to the war, found that their interests about a settlement could differ not only from one another but from those of Britain. Accordingly, the old arrangements began to unravel. Both at the 1919 Peace Conference and at the Washington conference two years later the dominions had separate representation and in each case it was their representatives who signed the treaties on behalf of the King. And in Australia, Justice Isaacs declared in 1922 that “the King’s agents to exercise the Royal authority with respect to each Dominion are those chosen by the people of that Dominion”.

Moreover, legal and constitutional provisions are one thing, but the behaviour of political leaders can be quite another. By the end of the war the prime minister was William Morris “Billy” Hughes. Of all the twentieth-century Australian prime ministers, it was surely Hughes for whom the bon mot was coined: “give me allies to fight against”. He was also God’s gift to Australian cartoonists. Irascible, volatile and voluble, he was ruthless in his pursuit of Australian interests as he saw them. He had the temerity to wage something like a battle royal with the British and even President Woodrow Wilson, on the issue of the former German colonies in the Pacific. His own civil servants were unhappy with him for affronting both the Americans and the Japanese: the first in his abruptness with President Wilson and the second in his attitude to questions of racial discrimination.

The outcome was that Australia, which had wanted to annex the formerly German South Sea islands that Commonwealth forces had captured, only managed to get control of New Guinea under a specially designed League of Nations mandate. That made very little practical difference, since the mandate was in a form that allowed administration as an “integral part” of the mandatory state. And as Hughes kept bluntly saying, “What we have, we hold.” (Though that didn’t necessarily mean much, either, given the smallness of Australia’s peacetime military forces.) Hughes also got his way in opposing a Japanese proposal that a racial equality clause should be written into the League of Nations covenant. It might have undermined the White Australia policy.

Furthermore, as early as 1919, while Hughes was still in London, the acting Prime Minister established an embryo foreign office by giving to the Pacific Branch of the Prime Minister’s Department the task of studying the affairs of the countries of the Pacific and the Far East, including the USA([8]). It was not enough, especially for a government which was, and remained, notably reluctant to spend money on international affairs (except as they related to trade).

But the Australian cabinet, and especially Hughes’s successor, Stanley Bruce, also concluded that Australia could not afford to be dragged, whether by Britain or some imperial conference, in the wake of a decision of which it had had no previous notice and which might diverge from the views of Australia’s own government. Bruce therefore arranged quietly with the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and then with Baldwin’s successor, Ramsay MacDonald, that an Australian liaison officer should go to London, and be fully informed of things as they developed. The appointee turned out to be Richard Casey, who took up his post, in the British Cabinet Secretariat, in 1924. He returned to Australia in 1931 and the post was filled by others, beginning with Sir Frederick Shedden.

Casey was clearly the right man for the job. He was young, personable, very well-to-do and had taken his degree at Trinity College, Cambridge. He and his wife had personal and family connections in the highest reaches of British society and government. He was also, as Professor Carl Bridge has pointed out, an “inveterate networker”([9]), highly appropriate for the London post. His personal and social friendship with Bruce was an additional asset. Indeed, his entire career is an excellent illustration of the value, in foreign relations, of informal and personal contacts even, sometimes especially, quite outside the realm official dealings and certainly well beyond the view of newspapers (or, later, of most political science theorists). Such things can be decisive and the examples are legion. One need only think of the despatch by the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, of a minor political figure, David Ormsby-Gore, as ambassador to the Kennedy administration in Washington. Not only because he was an able man but because he was an old personal friend of the incoming President who, almost immediately, became a valued member of John Kennedy’s inner circle.

So the arrangement was an undoubted success. Bruce himself who, after losing the prime ministership, went to London as Australian High Commissioner, remarked later that 

From the time Casey went to London … until I ceased to be High Commissioner in 1945, Australia was invariably better informed on international affairs, and had far more influence on the U.K. Government and its policy, than all the rest of the Empire put together.([10])

Similarly, Casey’s own reflection as late as the eve of the Second World War was that “The Prime Minister of Australia today receives as much information on the foreign affairs of the United Kingdom as most members of the British Cabinet.”([11]).

 One must not exaggerate, of course. It is true that Prime Minister Bruce found the Casey link between Canberra and London so useful that, after the Pacific Branch was abolished in the early 1920s, he saw no need for some other piece of machinery. For Bruce, the empire was anyway “one great nation” and no one else saw the need for formal foreign affairs service either. Change came only in 1935, with the setting up of a new Department of External Affairs at a time when world affairs had moved on and the spectre of a new war had started to appear. There was even a distant possibility that Australia might have to stand alone against a Japan that had withdrawn from the League and started a course of conquest in Asia.

With such prospects it was obvious that Australia’s network of information and diplomacy would have to be expanded. Accordingly Keith (later Sir Keith) Officer went to Washington in 1937 as Counsellor attached to the British embassy. By 1940 Casey himself moved, after a period of service in politics and even as federal Treasurer, to become Australia’s first Minister to the United States. Officer stayed on as his Counsellor. In the same year the Chief Justice of Australia, Sir John Latham, became Australian Minister to Japan. Others went to Ottawa in 1940 and the following year to China, and representatives also to Malaya and Timor.

The policies that the government pursued focused strongly on four issues. One was to urge the British to conciliate Germany and its ruler, Adolf Hitler. In June 1937 Prime Minister Joe Lyons spoke of the “vital necessity for appeasement” to the Imperial Conference, and a year later, in September 1938 Attorney-General Robert Menzies, soon to be Lyons’ successor, said much the same thing to London, urging the abandonment of Czechoslovakia([12]). (One of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s major arguments in refuting later criticism of his acceptance of the Munich agreement that gave Germany the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia, was that in 1938 the dominions had been unanimously opposed to war.) Exactly a year later Menzies wrote to Bruce in London to say that “nobody really cares a damn about Poland”([13]).

Once the European war began, a second issue was great anxiety about Japan and repeated urgings to London to conciliate Tokyo. Connected with this was the third issue: a repeated request for reassurance about the resources of the Royal Navy in Eastern waters, and the security of the great fortress of Singapore as a keystone of Australia’s safety. And finally, the wisdom and propriety of despatching the fighting men of most of Australia’s army to help defend the Middle East, especially since they might be needed to defend Australia itself.

Once France had fallen and most of the British army, its equipment and weapons abandoned on the beaches of Dunkirk, had been brought back to England, it was blindingly obvious that the future for both England and Australia depended very largely on the power of the United States, whose public, as we saw earlier, was still deeply isolationist.

Under these conditions the skills and, no less important, connections of Richard Casey came very much into their own. His service as federal Treasurer had earned him good opinions in the USA. His long service in London, and the connections and friendships he had formed there, were an even more irreplaceable asset. He not only became a friend and collaborator of the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, but in time even became a conduit for some very private messages that needed to be passed between Washington and London. At one point, for instance, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter used Casey as conduit to get a quiet message to Churchill about how essential it was for him to stress his high regard for Roosevelt when talking to Roosevelt’s alter ego, Harry Hopkins, who was on his way to visit London[14].

The larger Casey story has, of course been told in several places [15] But we now also have the private diaries for Casey’s critical Washington years, a period that Churchill fairly, if somewhat theatrically, has called the “Hinge of Fate”. These diaries have now been sensitively edited by Professor Carl Bridge and published by the National Library of Australia. [16] Most of Casey’s more important state papers have appeared elsewhere, and here, as with all diaries, allowance must be made for the fact that such documents are used for various purposes other than making a scholarly public record. They can be used simply to let off steam or put down of-the-cuff reflections. But Casey’s do illuminate America’s and the world’s approach to the watershed which was Pearl Harbor, and of Australia’s role and reactions to the critical developments in Washington before and after that event.

The diary also gives us, as seen through the eyes of an experienced political observer, a fresh picture of the slow evolution of the American political outlook from a provincial and inward-looking desire to be left alone, to the determined and unified nation that confronted the world after Pearl Harbor. Winston Churchill’s own reaction to Pearl Harbor was, of course, uncomplicated. As he famously wrote: “So we had won after all … We had won the war. England would live … I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”([17]).

Nevertheless, for Britain and Australia a series of other disasters quickly followed. On the very day of Pearl Harbor, a large Japanese expeditionary force landed in Malaya and began to march south towards Singapore. Two days later Britain’s most modern battleship, the Prince of Wales, and the battlecruiser Repulse, were sunk off the Malayan cost by land-based Japanese bomber squadrons whose capabilities and range the allied command had grossly underestimated. As the Japanese fought their way steadily southward it turned out, to Churchill’s horror, that the great Singapore base had no effective landward defences.

The Australians had long been very worried about Japan’s southward thrust in the Pacific. Indeed, as early as April 1941 Casey had written formally to the US Secretary of State to ask for US help to keep Japan in check([18]). But now there was serious alarm about the collapse of what had for so long been regarded as the guarantee of Australia’s security: the power of the Royal Navy and the fortress of Singapore.

On December 26, barely two weeks after the sinking of the Prince of Wales, the Australians received a report from Singapore that said, “the deterioration of war position in Malayan defence [is beginning to look like a] landslide collapse of the whole defence system”.([19]) The Australian reaction was strong. A day later John Curtin published his celebrated piece in the Melbourne Herald that included the following:

The Australian Government … regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom … we know that Australia can go, and Britain can still hold on. We are therefore determined that Australia shall not go …([20])

The document is of interest for several reasons. It can obviously be seen as a tipping point in Australia’s relations with the USA (though Curtin took care, in his March 1942 broadcast to America, to point out also that “We Australians, with New Zealand, represent Great Britain here in the Pacific—we are her sons” ([21])) But it also raised, not for the first or last time, Australia’s claim to be an equal partner in allied political and military war planning. In that, Australia was, and continued to be, frustrated. Neither the British nor the Americans had any intention of admitting the many smaller allies to central war planning. After all, and quite apart from evident issues of relative national power and interest, as that great American diplomat and scholar, George Kennan, remarked many years later, “The unlikelihood of any negotiation reaching an agreement grows by the square of the number of parties involved.”

Finally, the Curtin document illuminates the fundamental difference he had soon afterwards with Churchill about the proposal to divert some Australian troops to Malaya and then Burma, while Curtin demanded their return home to guard Australia itself against a Japanese invasion. It was a dispute about which much ink has been needlessly spilt. The facts are clear enough. Prime Minister John Curtin warned Churchill on January 23, “Singapore is a central fortress in the system of the Empire and local defence … we understood it was to be made impregnable, and in any event it was to be capable of holding out for a prolonged period until the arrival of the main fleet.” Its evacuation would be regarded as an “inexcusable betrayal”.([22])

Yet only three weeks later, on February 15, 1942, a large but ill-led and poorly equipped British and Australian army surrendered Singapore to a smaller but altogether more competent Japanese one. That finally knocked away the king-pin of Australia’s defences, as the Japanese underlined four days later, when Admiral Nagumo’s fast carrier group—the very force that had attacked Pearl Harbor—launched a strong air attack on Darwin that rendered it useless as a base for the time being. That illustrated, if illustration was necessary, the vulnerability of half the Australian population which was living in coastal cities.

Under these circumstances any Australian prime minister—especially one who, in Curtin’s words, was determined “that Australia shall not go”—would have been bound to recall his available troops for the defence of Australia. Churchill might be sceptical from the start about the likelihood that the Japanese would even try an invasion, a scepticism borne out by what is now known about Japanese planning, but that was not a view Curtin and his cabinet could take.

But Churchill was also right to ask for the diversion of troops to South-East Asia. From his point of view the security of Australia, though highly desirable, was not really essential if the overriding purpose was to win the war against Japan. After capturing Singapore, the Japanese had turned north into Burma. The supply routes from Burma into China were vital, since a Chinese collapse could mean the loss of the entire war. Not only that, but any Japanese irruption from northern Burma into India could also have fateful, war-losing consequences. In sum, from the point of view of winning the war, northern Burma was much more important than Australia.)

Australia was the base nearest to the Philippines that we could hope to establish and maintain … If [emphasis added] we were to use Australia as a base … we had to make certain of the safety of Australia itself.” Marshall’s response to the advice does not suggest desperate urgency either: “Do your best to save them.([23]

The Americans, too, seem to have regarded the security of Australia, while highly desirable as the anchor of South-West Pacific operations, as not really essential. A week after Pearl Harbor, General George Marshall, Roosevelt’s Chief of the General Staff, asked a member of his staff, Brigadier-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to consider what America’s line of approach to the Pacific campaign should be. Eisenhower concluded that

The Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, who had been Stalin’s Foreign Minister for ten years, was even more blunt. He told Casey that he could not see how the allies could base any successful attack on Japan from Australia. Air attack would not be effective either. The only way to beat Japan “was to beat Germany first and then to come overland through North China”.([24])

In any event, it was quickly agreed—Casey had made the point some time ago—that Australia would indeed be the firm base for the allied South-West Pacific command, which would be headed by an American, General Douglas MacArthur, based in Australia. The command would, of course, include Australian forces in the region. These arrangements secured Australia from invasion. To be sure, they left open the danger that Australian cities might be attacked by the Japanese fleet air arm, as Darwin had been. But that problem, too, was eliminated by the American victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in May and June 1942 which destroyed Japanese naval dominance in the Pacific.

The new arrangements also transformed the machinery of communication and co-operation between Australia and Washington. When Casey first arrived in Washington in 1940, and for over a year after that, he remained, perhaps naturally, outside the highest circles of US decision-making. His networking skills served him excellently at secondary and tertiary levels of government and he was wise—and well advised—enough to use them with enthusiasm and considerable success among groups potentially useful, even critical, in influencing US public opinion, such as the media, business and private groups of all kinds.

The approach of the Pacific war, however, and Pearl Harbor itself, transformed the situation. Casey, effectively Australia’s ambassador, now had access everywhere, including even to President Roosevelt. The Diary tells us that a mere fortnight after Pearl Harbor he took a message from Australia to Churchill, by then staying at the White House, and found himself in discussion not only with the Prime Minister, but with a group that included the Chief of Naval Staff, the Head of the British Staff Mission to the USA, and the Chief of Air Staff. They were joined by the President and the Secretary of the Navy, Colonel Knox([25]).

It goes without saying that in the context of a world war, and those elements of it that are vital for the modern history of Australia, the fate of a single individual like Richard Casey is a very minor affair. It is nevertheless worth noting that just as Casey’s role in Washington was blossoming, he came into difficulties with his own superior, the Foreign Minister. By now the post was held by the acerbic, suspicious and furiously intelligent Dr Herbert Evatt. For him, Casey was too rich, too well-connected and, not least, belonged to the wrong party back home. Such an attitude by his own Foreign Minister clearly made Casey’s position impossible.

The difficulties were resolved when, on March 14, 1942, Winston Churchill asked Casey to join the British War Cabinet as Minister of State for the Middle East. Here was surely a signal token of recognition of his services. Evatt agreed that he should accept the offer and Roosevelt was sympathetic too. A few days later he said to Evatt, with Casey present, “I told him he just had to go to Cairo in the general interest”([26]). Casey departed a week later, for a career of public service that culminated, some twenty years later, in the governor-generalship of his country.

Four things perhaps remain to be said. First, it is significant for any historian of Australia or of the British Commonwealth that there was a time, a mere half-century ago, when a senior Australian public servant could be asked, without undue fuss, to serve as a British minister. The implications are worth reflection at a time when many Australians speak of Britain as a “foreign country” while welcoming both immigrant flows one quarter of whom are from Britain, and institutional connections with international organisations.

Second, although the story of the ANZUS treaty, which has been the firm link between America and Australia since its signature in 1951, is a story for another day, the foundations created by the Second World War alliance were surely essential.

Third, it is not for nothing that Casey has sometimes been called the “father” of Australian diplomacy. Certainly after his time in Washington, and the effects of his posting there, there was never again any serious argument about Australia’s need for a competent and professional foreign service.

And finally, never before and never since has any Australian ambassador been called upon to serve in so vital a post at such a critical turning point not only in Australian but in world history.