Anzac's Dirty Dozen (11 page)

Further reading

C.E.W. Bean,
The Story of Anzac
, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 2 vols, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1921 & 1924.

A.G. Butler,
The Digger: A Study in Democracy
, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1945.

J. Crawford (ed.),
No Better Death: The Great War Diaries and Letters of William G. Malone
, Reed Books, Auckland, 2005.

F. Glen, ‘ANZAC today: What does ANZAC mean to contemporary New Zealanders?',
Wartime
, Official Magazine of the Australian War Memorial, 14, Winter 2001.

H.S. Gullett,
The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine
, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, vol. 7, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1923.

K. Hunter, ‘States of mind: Remembering the Australian–New Zealand relationship',
Journal of the Australian War Memorial
, 36, May 2002, <
www.awm.gov.au/journal/j36/nzmemorial.asp
>.

P. Londey,
Other People's Wars: A History of Australian Peacekeeping
, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004.

L. McAulay,
The Battle of Long Tan: The Legend of Anzac Upheld
, Arrow Books, Sydney, 1987.

J. McLeod,
Myth & Reality: The New Zealand Soldier in World War II
, Heinmann Reed, Auckland, 1986.

I. McNeill & A. Ekins,
On the Offensive: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War 1967–1968
, The Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2003.

R. O'Neill,
Australia in the Korean War 1950–1953
, 2 vols, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1981 & 1985.

C. Pugsley, C
Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story
, Hodder & Stoughton, Auckland, 1984.

[4]

OTHER PEOPLE'S WARS

Craig Stockings

In his recent documentary entitled
Other People's Wars
, filmmaker John Pilger described how Australians have ‘a special relationship with war'. ‘We fight', he contends, ‘mostly against people with whom we have no quarrel and who offer us no threat of invasion', and Australians have thus ‘paid a unique blood sacrifice in order to appease a great protector'.
¹
In other words, Australia has largely fought other people's wars that have been as unnecessary as they have been costly. It has done so either out of unthinking fidelity to great power protectors (either Britain or more recently the United States) or as a consequence of being duped or otherwise manipulated by these ‘big brother' allies. Pilger is certainly not alone in this view. Rather, he represents a continuing and pervasive perception of Australia's military past that runs through not only the popular media, but in wider social and scholarly circles as well.
²
On 26 April 1992, for example, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating made a speech about the Kokoda Trail in which he claimed:

Even though we fought in many conflicts where we felt pangs of loyalty to what was then known as the ‘Mother Country', to Britain and to the Empire, and we fought at Gallipoli with
heroism and in Belgium, in Flanders, in France and in other places, this was the first and only time we've fought against an enemy to prevent the invasion of Australia, to secure the way of life we had built for ourselves.
³

The inference is clear. According to Keating, all other wars before 1942 and after 1945 were consequences of misplaced loyalty and sentiment. Similarly, in an academic anthology published only last year entitled
What's Wrong with Anzac?: The Militarisation of Australian History
, Professors Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake make similar arguments: ‘Engagement in foreign wars has been one of the most distinctive features of Australia's twentieth century history. Many of them have been what are now commonly called wars of choice rather than wars of necessity.'
⁴
Again the implication is that Australia ought to have kept its nose well out of conflicts that did not concern it. Many other authors and commentators over time have chosen specific wars and sought to demonstrate Australia's mistaken choice to become involved, decisions they see as often having been made for the wrong reasons, with an incomplete knowledge of circumstances, or even under external coercion. Collectively such sentiments capture one of the most powerful and widespread misconceptions of Australian military history.

It is not the purpose of this chapter to make moral judgment on the wars Australians have fought from the colonial era to the present. Nor is it concerned with the outcomes of those wars, and questions of whether or not the manifold ‘aims' of various Australian military expeditions were met. Nor is there space to investigate what a concept like the ‘national interest' might mean exactly – are these the interests of everyday Australians, for example, or else the interests of those in positions of power and influence with potentially quite divergent priorities? Rather,
this chapter seeks specifically and singly to address the idea that these wars have belonged to ‘other people'; that Australian policy-makers have consistently been victims of their own sentimentality toward ‘great and powerful friends', or else been bullied or duped into appeasing these allies through military commitments better avoided and with little or no intrinsic consequence to Australia. This idea, while it may well have had (and no doubt still has) significant appeal to various political and intellectual agendas, simply fails to stack up to historical scrutiny or evidenced argument. Australia's wars have been her own. For better or worse, successive Australian governments have chosen to fight. They have done so in the main for cold, calculating,
realpolitik
reasons. This is not to suggest that powerful cultural and emotional connections, or appeals to the patriotism of Empire, or more recently to apparent need to impose ‘freedom' or ‘democracy', have not existed, nor played their part – especially as recruiting tools. Nor does it suggest that soldiers past and present have not ardently believed in the righteousness of their cause, or that these allies have not sought to shape Australian decision-making to serve their own ends. In all cases, however, there is need to pierce the shroud of propaganda and popular sentiment that inevitably surrounds decisions to participate in war. Private soldiers and private citizens do not choose when and where to commit themselves to armed conflict. They deploy, and die, on the orders of their government. Australian politicians have made such choices according to rational and realist principles – not sentiment.

In order to focus its argument, this chapter will first examine the decision to deploy the 2nd Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) to the Middle East in 1939. This is not at all a random choice. If ever there were a military expedition that should support the ‘case for the prosecution', it is this decision. This was a choice to commit the nation's only fully armed and equipped
regular (full-time) formation half-way around the world, at Britain's call, to protect British interests in North Africa from potential Italian aggression. Of what import was the fate of Egypt to Australia? Why should Australians be put in a situation where they might be forced to fight and die against an Italian enemy? The Germans were nowhere near Africa at this stage in the war. Even the Suez Canal was not of any real economic consequence to Australia.
⁵
Mussolini's reach could never seriously threaten the Pacific. Moreover, this decision was made in the context of an emerging and acknowledged threat to Australia from Imperial Japan. Why did arguments for keeping Australian soldiers at home to help balance this menace fail? To top it all off, of all the self-governing Dominions only Australia had taken the plunge of declaring war in the first place, immediately after Britain's decision to do so, without parliamentary approval. An unrepentant Prime Minister Robert Menzies justified his decision by pointing to public sentiment and the ‘impossibility' of the King being at war and Australia being at peace – an ‘impossibility' overcome in Eire (which stayed neutral) and one which did not stop parliamentary debate in the other Dominions.
⁶
Surely this was a case of committing to one of Pilger's ‘other people's wars'?

Despite claims over time by prominent authors such as David Day, Australia did not move to war in 1939, nor decide upon the deployment of its troops to far-flung battlefields, as an automatic consequence of British decision-making, duplicity or pressure.
⁷
The choice was quite deliberate and had been forming for a number of weeks as the inevitability of hostilities in Europe grew. Neither naivety nor blind imperial loyalty tipped the government's hand. The decision was, in fact, congruent with what appeared to be the national interest, particularly the value placed on the idea of resistance to international aggression and the concept of ‘imperial defence'. The traditional idea that British strength was
the best guarantor of Australian security was a keystone principle: for the Empire to be strong anywhere, it needed to be strong everywhere. Australia, therefore, ought to fight any and all of the Empire's wars so that if the day of crisis ever came for Australia itself then Britain, and in particular the Royal Navy, would be there in the nation's hour of need. In the 1920s and 1930s this policy was encapsulated in the ‘Singapore Strategy', whereby in a time of Australian peril British ships would sally forth from their base at Singapore and save the day.

The key problem for Australian political and civil figures, most of whom accepted the concept of imperial defence as an article of faith, was that by September 1939 – whether they chose to acknowledge it or not – Britain's power could no longer underwrite its promises.
⁸
Despite this, apart from a number of outspoken middle-ranking army officers, there had been little open dissent against the clear weakness of the Singapore Strategy throughout the 1930s. As the European crisis intensified, however, the possibility that British pre-occupation on that continent might leave Australia exposed to potential Japanese territorial ambition was a growing cause of concern, especially following Japanese advances against China from 1937. Very little stood in the way should Japan decide to exploit weakened European imperial positions in the Far East, and the open belligerence displayed by the Japanese during the Tientsin Crisis of mid-1939 was read by many as a statement of future intent. As a consequence, despite an early and outward appearance of solidarity, there were significant strategic divergences between Britain and Australia that would, given time and circumstance, drive the two nations apart. In 1939, however, the only real question was how far should Australia, with this potential local threat in mind, rally to the cause of imperial defence? The answer to this question sent Australian soldiers to the Middle East.
⁹

With the declaration of war, the question of what action Australia ought to take beyond passive measures at home became a topic of heated parliamentary and public debate. There was no regular army in 1939 to despatch to a European battlefield. Nor was there legal provision, as there was for naval and air forces, to send part-time militiamen to fight beyond Australian shores. On top of all this, given continuing uncertainty over Japanese intentions, the physical defence of Australia could not be neglected. As had been the case in 1914, if the government decided to send troops overseas in the cause of imperial defence, but without amending legislation its only choice was to raise a ‘special force' for that purpose.
¹⁰

The first obstacle to the idea of such an expeditionary force was political. While ready to support Menzies' decision for war, the Australian Labor Party was initially less enthusiastic about the idea of forming a full-time force for potential overseas service, even though there were standing military plans for such a contingency. While outwardly maintaining the line that he would wait and see what Britain requested before making a decision, Menzies too was hesitant for strategic reasons, and what he perceived as public opposition to the idea. On 5 September he cabled Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in London, to inform him that until Japanese intentions were clear it was pointless even to discuss the idea.
¹¹
Menzies was, from the earliest stages, neither a British stooge nor inspired to make a decision by emotional imperial sentiment. There was, however, a long-term British expectation that Australia would send an expeditionary force should it be required.
¹²
Pressure from Whitehall began to mount – but with remarkably little impact in Canberra. Despite British assurances to the contrary, and on the advice of the Australian Military Board, a calculating Menzies remained more concerned about Japan and the potential for strategic disaster in the Far East.

The political pressure on Menzies ratcheted up another notch, however, when on 9 September the New Zealand government announced its intention to raise its own ‘special force' in support of Britain. This was invaluable ammunition for the press, almost uniformly in support of an increased Australian commitment to the war. Eventually, under siege from all sides, an unsettled and reluctant prime minister made his choice. Again using radio rather than parliamentary procedure, Menzies announced during his regular Friday broadcast on 15 September the raising of the full-time force. He spoke of one division of 20 000 men to be used in Australia or overseas ‘as circumstances permit'.
¹³
Although widely approved by the public, the announcement caught the army completely by surprise. It was left to the Minister for Defence, Geoffrey Street, to spell out the details in parliament. Executive direction to raise the force, to be known as the 6th Division, 2nd AIF (as there were already four infantry divisions and part of a fifth in the militia), was given in mid-October 1939.
¹⁴