Anzac's Dirty Dozen (14 page)

There are two typical elements to the ‘other people's war' argument made by those set against the decision to commit troops to Vietnam. The first concerns how ‘necessary' such a commitment really was; the second the degree of American pressure placed on Australia to do so. Were we, once again, dragged into a war that belonged to a great and powerful friend? In the first instance, while the long-running tradition of the public's acceptance of governmental decisions to commit to war was perhaps broken by Vietnam, the traditional pattern of rational, realist decision-making was not. Both Robert Menzies, once again prime minister as the Vietnam crisis escalated, and his government – and most of the Western world for that matter – subscribed to the ‘Domino Theory' in South-East Asia. In a Cold War context, this theory seemed obvious at the time, even if historians have since come to accept that the domestic agendas behind the war between North and South Vietnam were more crucial than the overlay of ‘great power' agendas placed upon it. The clear Australian government consensus at the time was that if the Vietnam War ended with an outcome that denied South Vietnam a real and protected independence, then Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia would find themselves ‘vulnerable' to further Communist expansion. They would fall like dominoes up to Australia's very doorstep. This concept was a formidable reality to Australian policy-makers who were witnessing the boundaries of ‘aggressive' Communism coming closer and closer. Paul Hasluck, Minister for Defence in 1963 and 1964, provided ample insight into governmental thinking at the time:

I need not emphasise the importance to Australia of the outcome of events in South Vietnam. Our plain national
interest is to have a government there who will continue to fight the Viet Cong, to oppose North Vietnam, and to give some prospect to eventually unifying the country behind a stable anti-communist government which will still provide the local circumstances to enable the United States to keep a foothold in South-East Asia. Our second major interest is to retain an active United States presence in South Vietnam. Our third major interest is to prevent (not merely avoid) any major failure in South-East Asia of such a kind as to lead to a collapse of the will to resist in other countries.
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There is no case to be made that in this context, at that time, the Australian government – and Australians at large for that matter – saw the war as none of Australia's concern. That many sectors of the community changed their opinion as the war progressed, or that many Australians later came to doubt the legitimacy of the war as a whole, are important aspects of Australia's Vietnam experience. But they are largely beside the point insofar as the argument to commit Australian troops was concerned.

The Vietnam War raised a second issue regularly used by the proponents of the ‘other people's wars' interpretation of Australian military history: that Australia was somehow forced into the war reluctantly by pressure from Washington. By this thinking the United States simply replaced Britain in the role of a bullying ‘great power' ally, dragging Australia against its wishes and against its better judgement into conflicts better left alone. A cable sent, for example, by Alan Renouf, Australian Ambassador in Washington, on 11 May 1964 puts paid to this type of reasoning. Renouf explained:

Our objective should be … to achieve such an habitual closeness of relations with the United States and sense of
mutual alliance that in our time and need, after we have shown all reasonable restraint and good sense, the United States would have little option but to respond as we would want … The problem of Vietnam is one, it seems, where we could … pick up a lot of credit with the United States, for this problem is one to which the United States is deeply committed and in which it genuinely feels it is carrying too much of the load, not so much the physical load the bulk of which the United States is prepared to bear, as the moral load.
⁴⁴

The Australian government was forced into nothing as far as the Vietnam War was concerned. The commitment was willing and entered into with calculating clarity of purpose. In fact, as Gregory Pemberton has systematically demonstrated, it was the Australians who urged a hawkish policy on the Americans when they seemed to vacillate.
⁴⁵
Far from being dragged into the Vietnam War, Australian diplomats and ministers actively encouraged the Americans to commit troops. This was done, however, not out of any misguided loyalty or foreign coercion, but as a consequence of cold self-interest.

The model established for Vietnam serves equally well when applied to the most recent Australian military commitments abroad. Serious and voluminous public debate surrounded (and continues to surround) decisions to commit Australian troops to the occupation of Iraq and subjugation of insurgents in Afghanistan. Again, the issue of the legitimacy or even morality of both conflicts has from time to time assumed centre stage. Equally, as important as these questions are, they are irrelevant to the question of ‘other people's wars'. In years to come, Australian policy-makers may well have difficult questions to answer regarding how much their decisions reflected public will and sentiment.
The more blood and treasure spent in such places might also, in time, encourage future generations to judge the practical utility of such deployments. Four decades on, Renouf 's position still captures the essence of the matter. There was no blind loyalty to ‘Uncle Sam'.
⁴⁶
There is little evidence to suggest successful wholesale deception of the Australian government by Washington (although false American claims about the presence of ‘weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq are, perhaps, a partial exception). Nor is there sufficient proof of external pressure as a decisive factor. These commitments were made to achieve perceived policy objectives.

There are many reasons for the genesis and perpetuation of the ‘other people's wars' misconception in the military history of Australia. At one level, for example, it helps make more acceptable the monumental loss of life in conflicts like World War I, which in retrospect seem to many not to have been worth the river of blood spilled. It is comforting to shake our heads at the tragically sentimental attachment to the Empire and the horror it wrought upon our forebears. Alternatively, when the righteousness of the cause Australians have fought and died for appears open to dispute, from the Veldt to Vietnam, the ‘other people's war' argument eases our collective conscience to suggest that we were somehow tricked or pressured into doing someone else's dirty-work. There remains a powerful temptation to believe in our enduring historic ‘innocence' in this regard. At the other end of the spectrum, individuals and groups might find it convenient to push such a misconception to further their own agendas. In each and every case, however, the historical trail leads elsewhere. A myth is a myth. A half-truth is no truth at all. Australia's wars have been Australia's choices, or at least the consequence of the willing decisions of Australian politicians and policy-makers in pursuit of the perceived national interest. No enemy, apart from
Arthur Phillip, has yet to land on Australian shores. We have chosen when and where we fought. To students of politics and history, this should not be any great surprise. Long ago, Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz defined war as an innately political act with distinctly political objectives. This is what differentiates it against murder and other forms of killing. That generations of Australian governments have followed Clausewitz's dictum is axiomatic. As noted at the very beginning of this chapter, none of this is at all a commentary on the ‘correctness' of these wars in moral or practical terms, or of Australia's participation in them. Indeed, many such deployments, in the past and even the present, have much to answer for on both counts. Rather, the simple and singular point is that Australians have never, not once, nor by any stretch, fought ‘other people's wars'.

Further reading

J. Beaumont et al.,
Ministers, Mandarins and Diplomats: Australian Foreign Policy Making 1941–1969
, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2003.

C. Bridge (ed.),
Munich to Vietnam: Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s
, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1991.

D. Day,
Menzies and Churchill at War
, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993.

P. Dennis & J. Grey,
Emergency and Confrontation: Australian Military Operations in Malaya and Borneo 1950–1966
, Official History of Australia's Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, vol. 5, Allen & Unwin/Australian War Memorial, Sydney, 1996.

P. Dennis & J. Grey (eds.),
Serving Vital Interests: Australian Strategic Planning in Peace and War
, Army History Unit, Canberra, 1992.

J. Grey,
A Military History of Australia
, 3rd edn, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2008.

D.M. Horner,
High Command: Australia and Allied Strategy 1939–1945
, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982.

G. McCormack,
Cold War Hot War: An Australian Perspective on the Korean War
, Hale and Ironmonger, Sydney, 1983.

J. Robertson & J. McCarthy,
Australian War Strategy 1939–1945
, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1985.

G. Sheridan,
The Partnership: The Inside Story of the US–Australian Alliance under Bush and Howard
, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006.

R. Thompson,
Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era 1820–1920
, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1980.

C. Wilcox,
Australia's Boer War: The War in South Africa 1899–1902
, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002.

[5]

‘THEY ALSO SERVED': EXAGGERATING WOMEN'S ROLE IN AUSTRALIA'S WARS

Eleanor Hancock

Anzac Day is becoming Australia's
de facto
national day, and Anzac our national story. Yet despite well-meaning claims to the contrary, the Anzac myth does not include all Australians. It cannot include those who have migrated here recently, for example, or those whose ancestors fought on the ‘enemy' side. Unlike the Indigenous critique of Australia Day as a national day, this inconvenient truth about Anzac Day has not had the impact one might expect, presumably because those excluded are not in a position to criticise the mythology or the new centrality of Anzac Day out of fear of being labelled un-Australian. It is for this reason, perhaps, that those who commented favourably online on Marilyn Lake's critical article on the Anzac myth in
The Age
were so careful to point out their own family links to Australian military service.
¹

One response to the seeming Anglo-Celtic dominance of Anzac is a process we might call the ‘they also served' phenomenon, exemplified by the appearance of books on German Anzacs, Russian Anzacs, and the desire for groups that were previously marginalised to have their own war memorials. Yet even with the
national myth's exclusion of Australians whose ancestors arrived after the two World Wars or those who descend from the populations of nations that fought on the other side, the greatest apparent problem for Anzac as a national mythology is its exclusion of half of Australia's population – women.

In the twentieth century and beyond, Australia has fought its wars as expeditionary wars. Except for nurses, such expeditions excluded women until 1985, when the few and relatively small women's services were disbanded and their personnel integrated into the regular armed services. Only in 1990 were a number of combat-related duties opened to women, and only very recently, in 2011, were more direct combat-oriented occupations opened to both sexes.
²
But these are all relatively modern developments. How is the wholesale exclusion of Australian women from the Anzac story prior to 1985 to be reconciled? One way has been the development of the notion that Australian women somehow managed to make an important contribution to the Australian war effort in the two World Wars. As appealing as the idea might appear, and as useful a way as it might be to avoid Anzac friction along gendered lines, it is nonetheless a lingering and powerful myth.

Readers of this and
Zombie Myths
will be aware of the role that academic military historians play in correcting distortions in the Australian military fable, such as those that have been created for Australian women's participation in war. Yet there is a common misconception, even on the part of some fellow historians, that academic historians of Australian military history serve as high priests at the temple of Anzac. They do not. Instead they tend to be the most rigorous and well-informed critics of the Anzac mythology. Why then have these growing myths about the role of Australian women in war not been demolished? There are a number of possible explanations. One is this gap between military
historians and the wider profession.
³
The history of Australian military nurses, for example, falls between the stools. For historians of gender, it seems to be military history; for military historians, it may not appear to be military history proper. This gap results in an unsophisticated historiography about women's participation in the war effort. Moreover, male military historians may hold back from expressing their critiques of such works from a concern that they could be misinterpreted as a sexist form of gate-keeping. Finally, while some aspects of women's wartime participation in the World Wars in other countries have at times been seen as an advance in women's opportunities and/or their emancipation, Australia does not fit this model. The silence of general historians may reflect a certain avoidance of this discomfiting aspect of gender relations and women's history in this country.

In any case, Australia's tradition of expeditionary wars has meant that – aside from the bombing of Darwin and Broome in 1942 – Australians at home have never known the modern civilian experience of war, such as the horrors of deliberate civilian bombing and the difficulties of occupation by hostile foreign troops.
⁴
This has allowed a strict separation to exist between the military experience of war and the civilian experience in most Australian minds. This division was broken down as a result of the World Wars in nations such as Britain and Germany, but not in Australia. Its continuation in Australia has allowed many Australians to assume that civilian or non-combatant status will protect women from war's violence, and for a long time it has allowed Australians, including Australian feminists, to conceive of war as ‘secret men's business'. The 530-page Oxford
Australian Feminism: A Companion
– which defines feminism as including ‘a concern about women's claims to full citizenship and to recognition of their social, economic, cultural, and political participation' – has, for example, no entry on war.
⁵