Why Australia Fights Other People’s Wars

The wars Australia fought in the twentieth century are long over, and we are as we are, for better or worse. So does it matter in whose interests those wars were fought?

I think it does matter, profoundly. It matters for three reasons: the Past, the Present, and the Future.

The Past matters, because my father fought from first to last in the Great War, was wounded often and severely, and was once given up for dead, and because his identical twin brother was killed, at his side.

“What passing-bells” (that is, death knells for those passing over to the other side) “for those who died as cattle?” asked Wilfred Owen. The least I can do in answer is to examine whether my father and his brother and all those other Australians, then and since, fought the good fight, or instead fought in vain and senselessly.

The Future matters, because the issues thrown up by our past wars did not die with those wars. Those issues will confront us again, and we need to have our answers ready.

The Present matters, because the present connects past to future, shaping the future, including by how it views the past. Even if the only lesson history teaches, as some aver, is that it teaches none.

I have also a fourth reason for believing that the answer to this question matters. That is my belief in the existence of objective truth, a belief that one view is not as good as another. Certainly, objective truth is apt to be many-sided, so that a one-sided view is not enough. But that means only that the object needs to be examined from various sides, not that every view has to be balanced by an equal and opposite view or that every view carries equal weight.

Since the formation of Australia on the first day of the first month of the twentieth century, five major wars involving combat forces from at least three continents erupted before the century’s end. Only two countries had combat forces in each of those five wars. Only one of the two was combat-engaged virtually from the beginning of each of the five wars. And only one—the same one—became engaged without ever being attacked first.

And yet Australians are not a bloodthirsty people,[1] have no long tradition of military prowess, are not particularly belligerent, have no unseemly attachment to martial virtues, have no private military academies for teenagers, have barely heard of Nietzsche and others who have been taken as glorifying war, and wouldn’t recognise social Darwinism if it knocked at the door.

Moreover, Australia’s unique martial record is perplexing for yet another reason: its very first Defence Bill—which was the very first major bill to be presented to the new Australian Parliament, in 1901—was withdrawn because of widespread opposition, not least to the bill’s empowering the government in an emergency[2] to call out the defence forces for active service not only within Australia—to which of course nobody objected—but also for active service outside Australia.

What the bill’s many parliamentary critics[3] objected to was the granting of power to the government to compel service overseas. The critics[4] felt that the government might use that power to order Australian soldiers to fight overseas (Higgins specifically mentioned Ireland and India) not in genuine defence of Australia but rather in defence of British imperial interests.[5]

And indeed that is the heart of the various criticisms levelled over more than a century against Australia’s involvement in all those five wars: that they were not Australia’s wars but rather other people’s wars; that a servile Australia had five times allowed itself to be gulled, first by Britain, more recently by America, into fighting far from Australia’s shores, and that in none of those five wars was Australia’s participation in Australia’s interests but only in the interests of others.

That is the dominant theme of criticism, but minor themes are also heard—some contrapuntal, but all taking as their starting point that Australia’s participation was not in Australia’s interests. Thus, for the First World War, say the critics:

The war was not only not in Australia’s interest but in fact was in nobody’s interest, since (variously) everybody lost, it solved nothing, the cost was so huge that nothing could justify it, and it was an unnecessary and avoidable war, wanted by nobody, the result simply of miscalculation, mistrust and mistake. Australia’s participation was not in Australia’s interests because our contribution was too small to affect the outcome, which in any case was never really in doubt since Germany could not possibly have overcome the combined strengths of Britain, France, Russia and the USA. And Australia’s participation was not in Australia’s interests because Australia’s contribution was wasted by inept British generals.

Before examining the main theme of Other People’s Wars, I look first at the various minor themes, which might be identified as the donkeys argument, the camel’s straw argument, and the Nullarbor argument.

The Donkeys. The argument here is that Australia’s participation in the Great War was not in Australia’s interests because of the enormous sacrifices we suffered by letting our lions be led by donkeys—those inept British generals who threw us first into the fiery furnace of an appallingly planned and managed Gallipoli, and then, when that ended in retreat, objective unwon, threw us into the mindless, horrifyingly bloody meat-mincer of the trench-warfare Western front.

Douglas Haig is easy to vilify. It was Haig who told the War Office in 1915 that “the machine gun is a much over-rated weapon, two per battalion is more than sufficient”; and it was Haig who even after the war insisted that planes and tanks would find use in future campaigns “only as accessories to the man and the horse”, and who asserted that “as time goes on, you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past”. And Haig was by no means the only donkey; indeed, according to many politicians, historians and military writers, none of the other generals, even including Kitchener, was much good at anything but braying.[6]

So the conclusion is easy to reach that Australia’s interests—if indeed we had any—were betrayed by British ineptitude. But in truth we had no alternative to placing ourselves under the British, to fight where they fought and as they fought. For we were too few even to supply our own logistics, let alone to enjoy independence of command, and still less to pursue a different strategy. So we could not have taken ourselves off to fight some more appealing, less costly battles on our own. If we were to fight at all, it had to be with and under the British; and it had to be in France once Gallipoli proved a busted flush.

Moreover, the type of heavy-casualty, largely static war in which we found ourselves was not chosen by the donkeys out of perversity or stupidity from a range of more attractive alternatives. The Germans were entrenched in a large and productive part of France, not far from Paris—and Calais. If they were not thrown out, they would win simply by staying where they were, slowly breaking down French morale and the French soldiers’ fighting spirit.[7] So our side could not just stand on the defensive, or fight elsewhere. And in thus necessarily taking the offensive, and making our main effort in France, we could not engage in a less costly war of manoeuvre—we had not the means. We simply had to slog it out, often timing and placing our offensives not to our own best advantage but to help our allies, Russia as well as France. And the Allies won in the end precisely by slogging it out better, not by a dramatic new strategy or even invention of the tank but because of the long, slow pressure of sea blockade, and because of the introduction in 1918 of more artillery, better shells and, above all, the means to apply accurate counter-battery fire.

So to say that Australia’s participation in the Great War was not in Australia’s interests because we should somehow have been able to get out from under the inept British and to find a less costly way of participating is to miss the point entirely. Australia’s interests simply could not have been met in a radically less costly way.

Camel’s Straw. The argument here is that, even assuming that beating Germany was in Australia’s interests, Australia’s participation was not in our interests because our contribution was too small to make a difference. That is to say, as victory would not have turned into defeat without Australia, we would have been better off, and our allies no worse off, if we had simply stayed home.

Trying to prove that Australia’s straw was the one that broke the camel’s back is difficult, much more difficult than gainsaying Noel Annan’s judgment that “Britain fondly imagined that she had won the [second] world war. She had not. America and Russia won the war.”

Still, one can make an effort to prove that Australia’s straw was the final one, by pointing to three things.

First, 1917. The French after Verdun and the great mutiny in 1917 were, in Haig’s words, “a broken reed”. Russia was in chaos, with mutinies in the trenches and revolution in the streets; Italy was a net liability; America had neither the intention nor the capability of taking a serious combat part in the war till mid-1918 at the earliest. Only Britain and the Empire were still standing, still slinging punches, still planning in the confident belief that one more push with the two million men under Haig’s command would end the war in 1917. True, Australia had only five of the 160 Allied divisions in France—some 3 per cent. But those five were three more reliable divisions than France had.[8] And what divisions the Australians were—not only in their fighting quality but because, unlike the British and French, the Australians were not only all volunteers but were virtually all combat troops, their logistics being provided by the British.

Second, Villers-Bretonneux. The mighty German offensive begun in March 1918, after the Treaty of Bret-Litovsk had enabled Germany to move whole armies from its eastern to its western fronts, very nearly disjointed the British from the French. The German objective was to knock Britain out of the war by rolling up the British armies and pushing them back not to Dunkirk, which was in German hands, but to Boulogne and Calais and the waiting transport ships, thus leaving France to be dealt with on its own. The German offensive came close to achieving its object.[9] And where the British—and so the French, and indeed the war—were saved, it could be argued, was Villers-Bretonneux, in a three-day action culminating on the night of Anzac Day 1918.

The Australians, in a famous action, described by the British Brigadier-General Grogan VC as “perhaps the greatest individual feat of the war”, re-took the position overlooking Amiens, which was not only at the hinge of the British and French armies but was also a crucial railway junction.[10] If Amiens had gone, the British army would have gone with it, and France would have been left impossibly on its own.

Third, August 8, 1918. This was the day on which the Australians under Monash made an extraordinary advance, east of Amiens and south of the Somme. In the seven weeks of superb Australian fighting that followed, the Australians, who constituted only 8 per cent of the British army in the line, made 22 per cent of the British captures in all of France, and carried out what was described by General Rawlinson as the greatest infantry feat of arms in the whole war, the taking of Mont St Quentin. Those seven weeks ended with the breaching of the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line. August 8 was so disastrous to German arms that Hindenburg described it as “our first great disaster, from which there could be no recovery”; Ludendorff called it “the black day of the German army”—and advised his government to seek peace terms.[11]

So the Australians played a noble part in the avoidance of Allied defeat and in the winning of the war. But I have to say, reluctantly, that the Australians were probably not the final straw. Partly that reluctant conclusion arises out of a philosophical quandary: why should the final straw be given more weight, so to speak, in the breaking of the camel’s back than any of the other straws that had gone before? If just one of those straws had been missing, the final straw would have been just another straw.

Partly, though, my reluctant conclusion arises from substantive doubts. Although 1917 was a bad year it was not so bad that the absence of the Australians would have handed victory to the Germans. Villers-Bretonneux was important, but C.E.W. Bean has repudiated the claim that it was the “turning point” of the great German offensive. Moreover, August 8 in itself and as the starting point of a momentous advance was a great feat, but the Canadians on our right that day (though not the British on our left nor the French on the Canadian right) did just as well, and the succeeding advance was matched in other parts of the Western front.

Still, the camel’s-straw claim is not to be either won or lost by considering Australia’s contribution to be five divisions alone.

In the first place, they were not just five divisions. They were fighting divisions, as we had no logistical tail. And they were five of the very best—perhaps the five best—fighting divisions on the Western front, the only troops able consistently to beat the Germans, elite forces often used as shock troops at the spear’s head[12] or as rescue troops when others failed—as the Americans did in September 1918 in the assault on the Hindenburg Line. No wonder Marshal Foch said the Australian infantry were the finest of the war.

Second, the Australians had, in Monash, from mid-1918 onwards, the best Allied corps commander the war produced. He not only made his Corps[13] a superb fighting instrument; he also became an exemplar throughout the British armies, not least in how to concert the use of infantry, artillery, tanks and aircraft. His battle orders for Hamel—“the perfect battle” according to General J.F.C. Fuller, in which the importance of concentration and how to effect it were first demonstrated—were published by Haig for the guidance of commanders throughout the British armies.

And Monash’s exemplary contributions did not stop there.

• he introduced double-leapfrogging, unique in that or any other war, to aid deep penetration by reducing stress and fatigue in battle;

• he was the first to use (on August 8) a new system for calibrating artillery, so doing away with “registration” fire which betrayed a coming offensive;

• he was the first to insist (again on August 8) on the importance of driving through to the German gun line on the first day of an offensive, to prevent the guns’ retirement and resumed shelling;

• he was the first—and only—British corps commander to be given (temporary) control of a whole American corps, numbering 50,000 men, so bringing the total under his charge to some 166,000;

• at a time when most corps commanders relied exclusively on written orders, Monash insisted on prior battle conferences with his generals and brigadiers, in order to “[mould] a uniformity of tactical thought and method throughout the command … to [permit] an exhaustive and educative interchange of views … [to give] each commander or service … the advantage not only of receiving instructions regarding his own action, but also of hearing in full detail the instructions conveyed to his colleagues” and to enable Monash “to apply the requisite driving force to all subordinates collectively, instead of individually, and thereby create a responsive spirit which was competitive”;

• battle conferences were not confined to the generals: the plan for each battle, and description of the objectives, were given to all ranks by their officers before zero hour—a practice unique to the Australian corps in the consistency of its application;

• he not only introduced many tactical innovations but also combined them into a standard battle drill based on sound principles;

• and above all he was noted and emulated, though late in the day, for his open-minded and adventurous use of all available arms to assist the infantry:

I had formed the theory [wrote Monash] that the true role of the infantry was not to expend itself upon heroic physical effort, nor to wither away under merciless machine-gin fire, nor to impale itself on hostile bayonets, nor to tear itself to pieces in hostile engagements … But on the contrary to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources, in the form of guns, machine guns, tanks, mortars and aeroplanes; to advance with as little impediment as possible; to be relieved as far as possible of the obligation to fight their way forward.

So great was Monash’s contribution that the historian Liddell Hart said Monash “had probably the greatest capacity for command in modern war among all who held command … His grip of situations silenced all doubters and compelled the admiration of even the most critical professional soldiers”—for Monash was of course a civilian soldier, an engineer by profession.

Lloyd George in his memoirs deplored the fact that his generals—out of jealousy, he implied—had not brought Monash to his notice during the war, recounted the post-war view of those he trusted (such as Liddell Hart) that Monash was “the greatest strategist in the Army” … “the most resourceful General in the whole of the British Army”, and hinted that, if only he had known about Monash, he would have put him in place of Haig, whom Lloyd George loathed. Monash himself wrote, “the performance of my five Divisions and Corps troops has not been surpassed in the whole annals of War”.

The political dimension provides the third of the reasons why the camel’s-straw claim is not to be either won or lost by considering Australia’s contribution to be five divisions alone. For Australia contributed not only troops but also unflagging political and economic support. Australia strengthened Britain’s resolution to continue the struggle—and correspondingly weakened Germany’s—not only by signifying willingness to go on shedding blood but also by adding Australia’s political and economic weight and resources to Britain’s and by denying those things to Germany. Australia’s contribution in those ways was not overwhelming. But when added to the contributions in those same ways by Canada and New Zealand and South Africa, and since denying Germany sinews of war and the bread of life was a large factor in forcing Germany into submission,[14] Australia’s non-military participation in the war was of large importance.

Putting all the camel’s-straw arguments together, what are we left with? Uncertainty, I’m afraid, a line-call.

If such a thing as a final straw has meaning, my own judgment is that Australia’s various forms of contribution did not amount in total to the final straw—we were not crucial to victory. Still, I think our contribution did shorten the war. Almost everyone on the Allied side thought almost to the end that the war would go on into 1919, even 1920. I think they would have been right had it not been for Australia.

But let us suppose that not even that much can validly be said about the value of Australia’s contribution, and let us concede that certainly no more, and perhaps rather less, can validly be said about the value of Australia’s participation in the other major wars of the century. Does that mean that Australia should have stayed apart from those wars, or anyway might as well have?

The answer, I am sure, is No—for moral, practical and psychological reasons.

The moral answer can be illustrated by an unlikely source: a law case, from the seventeenth century. The Ship-Money Case is in all the textbooks as one of the incidents in the constitutional struggle in Britain between Crown and Parliament over their respective powers. Charles I, needing money for the Royal Navy, and not wanting to go cap in hand to Parliament, in 1636 sent out ship-money writs requiring each of the towns and counties in England to supply certain numbers and sizes of ships, together with their crews, armaments and victuals. A resident of Buckinghamshire, one John Hampden, whose share of the expense had been assessed by the county authorities as twenty shillings, refused to pay, almost certainly because of simple opposition to the new tax, though his lawyers argued on the more elevated ground of constitutional principle: that taxes required the assent of Parliament. Of the twelve judges who heard the case, nine had no doubt that ship money was a legitimate charge on the subject even without prior Parliamentary approval. So Hampden lost, and Parliament lost out.

But the main interest in the case, it seems to me, is not the constitutional point but the moral point implicit in another of Hampden’s arguments, which went not to the raising of the tax but to its incidence. Hampden pointed out that, while ship-money writs went back a long way, no precedent existed for their being applied to inland counties such as Buckinghamshire. Previous writs had all been directed only to coastal towns and counties, evidently because they were best placed both to provide ships and crews and also to benefit from their use in protecting the coasts of England and in keeping the seas safe for Britain’s sea-borne trade and fisheries.

But the judges would have none of Hampden’s argument. Three years previously, they had given an advisory opinion that when the benefit of naval defence was more particularly felt by the coastal districts, they alone should contribute to the cost—but that when the king judged that the danger extended to the country as a whole, the burden of defence should fall on all alike. Moreover, as the king had put it in his last ship-money writ directed to the coastal counties alone, while “you constituted in the sea coasts … are chiefly bound to set your helping hand” in the taking of action against “the dangers … which on every side do hang over our heads”, really “that charge of defence which concerned all men ought to be supported by all”. And the judges themselves, the year before the Ship-Money Case was heard, had supplied a like advisory opinion to the king:

we are of opinion that, when the good and safety of the general kingdom[15] is concerned and the whole kingdom is in danger, your majesty may …. command all the subjects of this your kingdom at their charge to provide … for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom from such danger and peril.

So the Ship-Money Case illustrates nicely the moral principles of burden sharing, of no free rides, of user pays, of your turn to shout.[16] If Australia would benefit from Germany’s being beaten, then Australia had a moral duty to contribute—even if that contribution did not make all the difference.

The practical answer to those who think Australia should not have gone to war is that those who benefit without putting in get scant regard from those who have done their bit. If Australia had stayed out of the war, would we have been admitted to the Versailles Treaty as a negotiator and a signatory? Or have been given New Guinea and a share of Nauru? More widely and less immediately, would Australia’s concerns in later years have been listened to and at least in part accommodated? Contributing now in order to benefit later is sometimes called the insurance premium theory[17] of international relations, and is widely derided by the fashionable. But derision, especially by the fashionable, is not invalidation.

The psychological answer is a question: How, if we had not contributed, would we Australians have lived with ourselves? It is one thing not to be capable of full self-reliance, quite another to make no effort at all, to be content with being bludgers, and still retain a decent self-regard.

Perhaps all that is so, you might say, but each of those answers—the moral, the practical, and the psychological—has a large assumption at its base: that the five wars were truly ours and not other people’s, that Australia as a nation had a genuine stake in them, that our participation was the result of open-eyed self-interest, not of moon-eyed devotion to mother or uncle, or of kowtowing and gullibility.

And so we are back at the principal question with which we began. But before turning to that, I have one final minor theme to consider.

Nullarbor

The argument here is that the war was unnecessary because it began by mistake, was unjustifiable because it continued at such huge cost, and was pointless because it ended with everybody losing. So, the argument runs, the war was a treeless desert which Australia would have done better not to enter.

Was the Great War truly unnecessary and avoidable, wanted by nobody, the result simply of miscalculation, mistrust, mistake? Quite a few believe so. And of course all those things are undeniably true in some senses. Germany did make a mistake; it lost. Germany did miscalculate; it thought it could get what it wanted without war, or anyway without war just yet, or at least with only a local war. Nobody wanted the war; each participant hoped against hope that it could get what it wanted (a quiescent Germany, a compliant Britain, France and Russia) without fighting for it. The war was avoidable; it takes two to war, and Britain and France could always have declined to pick up the gage Germany finally threw down.

But those senses are not very sensible, and most who have bothered to inform themselves, and to think, about the issues are nowadays of the view that in starting the war[18] Germany knew what it was risking by proceeding but felt impelled to continue nevertheless; and that Britain knew what it would risk by not proceeding, and felt compelled to proceed as a result. Those views are held most strongly by German historians, notably the incomparable Fritz Fischer.

Was the cost of the war so huge as to make it unjustifiable? The cost was certainly enormous: the millions of lost and impaired lives; the economic ruin of Britain; the continuing political costs of the dismantling of the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Turkish empires; all the costs of engendering the Second World War; and so on. But the size and nature of the costs do not automatically mean that the Allies were unjustified in meeting Germany’s challenge. For against the costs to our side of fighting have to be set the costs of our not fighting: the inevitable costs to territorial integrity and to political independence and to personal freedoms. Furthermore, on whichever side we might think the balance of costs comes down, that judgment at the time had to be made before anyone knew what the full costs were going to be.

So the question of whether the cost of the war was so huge as to make it unjustifiable is not easy to answer, even now. But I cannot accept that the world should be handed over to whoever threatens first and most. The meek shall inherit the earth, we are told. I doubt it, and see a lesson in the wall which had scrawled on it two sentences, in different handwriting: “The meek shall inherit the world”, and underneath it, “If that’s all right with the rest of you”.

Did the war end with nobody really winning, with everybody losing, with nobody having achieved anything, or anyway not enough? I cannot think it. For the Allied side, the great thing was what might be termed the achievement of prevention, the prevention of being overrun by a Wilhelminian, Prussian Germany. True, the Allied side not only won the last battle but also won in the sense of gaining territorially at the expense of Germany and Turkey. But the real win was simply not to have lost. The prevention of achievement was our side’s simple aim in the war, and the achievement of prevention was our large gain.[19]

Still, you might say, all those judgments about the Nullarbor propositions that the war was unnecessary, unjustifiable and pointless, while perhaps true of Britain and France, surely had no application to far-distant Australia. And so once again we are back at the question with which we began: in whose interests did we participate in those five wars? Were they truly our wars, or were they other people’s?

Other People’s Wars?

Those who contend that Australia’s five wars were not truly in our interests but only in other people’s are really saying that Australia had no interest in the outcome of any of those wars, or anyway insufficient interest to justify Australia’s participation.

If Germany had won the Great War, the suggestion is, beating Britain in the process, many Australians would have been sad for kith-and-kin and other basically sentimental reasons, such as attachment to Empire; but Australia as a country, so peripheral and so unattractive as not to be under any real threat of German invasion during the war, would have had no substantive reason to care who won and so, the conclusion is, should have stayed out.

At the base of such thinking are two assumptions: first, that only invasion matters, that the only proper use of Australian armed force in war is against a foe engaged in invading us, or anyway clearly intent on invasion[20]; and second, on the related assumption that distance governs, that what happens close by is our concern while what happens far off is not. Both assumptions are quite unjustified.

For one thing, security and defence, though almost universally used synonymously, are in truth not coincident, though they are connected. Second, threats of invasion are not the only threats to our security, or even to our defence. And third, changes to our security circumstances can be adverse not only if they threaten our territorial integrity but also if they threaten our political independence.

Crucial to those three points is the distinction I draw between security and defence. Defence involves the protection of a country’s territorial integrity against armed attack, whether that attack involves, at one extreme, invasion with the object of occupation or, at the other extreme, low-level harassment and landing parties or lodgement, or whether that attack falls between those extremes by involving such things as missile blows, air raids, and naval shelling.

So defence is concerned with others’ military capabilities, their range and application.

Security, on the other hand, is a broader concept that involves consideration of the whole range of a country’s national interests, including maintenance of political independence, or freedom from foreign constraints on independent national decisions. So security is concerned with changes in the shape of the world that seriously affect a nation’s ends and means—including things military, but far from confined to things military.

Thus if Germany had won the Great War, becoming thereby the master of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, and resuming possession of its former colonies and acquiring new ones all over the place, the whole world in which Australia lived and had its independent being would have been gravely damaged. And that deep change in a fundamental of our security circumstances would have been of fateful importance for Australia, even though in itself not involving invasion of Australia.

Australia, and everybody else if Germany had won the war,[21] would have been looking upwards from the bottom of an impossibly steep power gradient, confronting a stark choice—a choice neatly underlining the relationship between defence and security. That choice would have been between two unappealing alternatives, each leading to the loss in large or even total measure of Australia’s political independence. The first alternative would have been to adjust our policies to the new realities—what might be called pre-emptive capitulationism. The second alternative would have been to have Germany change our policies for us by force.

These considerations, of course, also apply to the Second World War. The Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars were not as cataclysmic as the world wars, but in all three of those other wars our enemies, if they had been left to achieve their original expansionist aims, would have changed drastically the shape not just of their regions but of the world; and in so doing would have damaged Australia’s security. So it was in Australia’s own interests to go to battle in those wars too.

Two consequences flow from understanding that security and defence, though different, are connected by time if our security circumstances worsen badly enough.

The first consequence is that the global strategic environment, not just the regional, affects Australia’s security, powerfully. The second consequence is that developments that affect our security interests are not confined within the circumference of the effective exercise of our independent military power in what has been termed Australia’s area of direct military interest, roughly 1000 miles out from Australia, or even within the circumference of the wider area of South-East Asia and the South-West Pacific, which has been termed Australia’s area of primary strategic interest.

So Australia, as the five major wars of the twentieth century showed, needs in its own interests to be worldly-wise.

Michael Cook was Director General of the Office of National Assessments and served as Ambassador to the USA from 1989 to 1993.