Cruiser (41 page)

Civic dignitaries were all very well, thank you, but Elmo had other things in mind. On that leave, he fell in love. Kathleen Brewer was the daughter of family friends, still a teenager, who worked as a telephonist at Wodonga, up on the New South Wales border. A slender, pretty girl and a good tennis player, she had no shortage of local admirers, but there was something about the young Gee boy, with his tales of travel and adventure, that drew her like a magnet. He had eyes only
for her. Each day, they grew happier in each other's company, at bush dances or just walking out.

When the winter evenings drew in and tea was on the table, there was the news on the radio, and that seemed to be improving. The Russians were putting up a stout resistance to the Germans near Leningrad. The RAF had raided Berlin. Federal Cabinet would meet to consider the situation in the Far East. Of course, though, the hard truths of the war were carefully concealed by the military censors, and the threat to Australia was moving closer. Japan, now irrevocably committed to Nanshinron, moved to guard its northern back door. In April, the Japanese Foreign Minister, the neurotic Yosuke Matsuoka, travelled to Moscow to parley in the Kremlin with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. Watched over by an impassive Joseph Stalin, the two Ministers signed a Soviet– Japanese Neutrality Pact, in which each country pledged to remain neutral if the other was attacked.

This stirred the Americans. US Secretary of State Cordell Hull presented the Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Kichisaburo Nomura – a former admiral – with a demand for a halt to any further warmongering. Japan, he warned, should respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations and agree not to interfere in their affairs. He might as well have delivered it to a brick wall. Matsuoka ordered his ambassador to reply with a peremptory request for Washington also to sign a neutrality pact. This stalemate sputtered along until July, when the IJA lunged again. With the ‘agreement' of the hapless Vichy French colonial government in Hanoi, the IJA occupied the southern part of Indochina, present-day southern Vietnam and Cambodia. Japan now controlled air and naval bases on the South China Sea – an ideal springboard into the Pacific or towards the British and Dutch colonies in South East Asia.

The alarm bells rang once more. His patience thinning by the day, President Roosevelt retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States. Britain and the Dutch East Indies followed suit. The results were profound. Overnight, Japan saw
three-quarters of its overseas trade wiped out, including the imports of tin and rubber vital for its war machine. Worse, its imports of oil were virtually choked off, provoking a mixture of fury and panic as the generals and admirals realised they had only a year's supply in reserve. What the West threw down as a warning, they took as yet another mortal insult. If there was any single point at which the militarists in Tokyo decided that war with the United States was inevitable, this was it. Upping the ante yet again, the army swept aside the Vichy French and occupied Saigon.

The Australian Government was also alarmed by this new escalation. The Ambassador to Japan, Sir John Latham, sought an urgent meeting with Matsuoka to ask, in polite diplomatic language, what on earth was going on. On 29 July, he reported the conversation to Canberra, with the Foreign Minister's suave assurance that the invasion was:

In London and in Canberra, as ever, Singapore was the hinge on which everything swung. And at nearby Batavia in the
Netherlands East Indies, the Dutch colonial administration also saw Singapore as its front line.

But the United States disagreed, and fundamentally. At joint military staff talks held in Singapore in April, the British, Australians and Dutch were on one side of the argument and the still neutral Americans on the other. After days of negotiation, they politely agreed to differ. For the American officers at the conference, if Singapore was lost to the Japanese it would be ‘unfortunate' but not disastrous. On instructions from Washington, they were adamant that the United States Navy would not divide its naval force in the western Pacific – the Asiatic Fleet, based in the Philippines. No American ships would be sent to Singapore, either to forestall a Japanese attack there or to meet one if it happened. If push did come to shove and the US was somehow drawn into a war, the American strategy would be to draw the Japanese fleet further east, towards the Marshall Islands, and meet it there. Tactfully, they refrained from saying that it was not worth spilling the blood of American boys in defence of a British colony, but the implication was clear. Japan was a menace to everyone, no doubt about that, but the defence of the American eastern seaboard was the primary concern in Washington. As if to emphasise that, between April and June the US Navy sent the battleships
Idaho
,
Mississippi
and
New Mexico
, the carrier
Yorktown
, four cruisers and two full destroyer squadrons from the Pacific to American Atlantic bases.

Robert Menzies had returned from his overseas trip to Britain and the United States at the end of May, well satisfied with his reception. He had been lionised by the British Establishment as just the sort of stout-hearted colonial chap the Empire could depend on in its hour of peril, and he had met all the right people in Washington, including President Roosevelt for an hour. He had done his best to push Australia's concerns about
Japanese expansion to a British prime minister preoccupied with the war in Europe, and he believed he had gained at least a sympathetic ear on the same subject in Washington.

But the raw truth was that Australia was a small country, and far away. Despite flattering himself that men of influence in Britain wanted him somehow to become a member of the House of Commons, Menzies was only a bit player on the world stage. The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, bent on forging an increasingly close partnership across the Atlantic, had no intention of including him or anyone else in a
ménage à trois.
Australia would, in due course, be informed of the decisions they had taken.

That August, as
Perth
was preparing for her triumphant entry into Sydney Harbour, Roosevelt and Churchill were holding their first meeting face to face, at distant Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, off the east coast of Canada. It was an occasion rich in history's drama. The Prime Minister, always the showman, crossed the Atlantic in the battleship
Prince of Wales
. The President, not needing to impress, turned up in a smaller ship, the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta
. Their talks, interspersed by formal luncheons and dinners and a solemn religious service for which Churchill personally chose the hymns, laid out what became known as the Atlantic Charter. It was their vision for a democratic post-war world. But Roosevelt knew that the American people were not ready to be drawn into the fight for it. The United States would send Britain all the sinews of war: guns, ships and aircraft, food and oil (albeit for a price) but it was not yet willing to start shooting. Least of all against the Japanese. When the conversation turned to the Far East, Churchill urged the President to take an uncompromising stand against Japanese aggression by publicly declaring that:

In the niceties of diplomatic language, this would have been tantamount to a declaration of war, and the President was not buying it. After more splendid diplomatic and naval flourishes, Churchill sailed back to Britain warmed by Roosevelt's firm support for the destruction of ‘Nazi tyranny' but disappointed by his equivocation on Japan. Five days later, Ambassador Nomura in Washington was handed a note that warned only that:

In the view from Washington, where Congress sat on Capitol Hill in splendid isolation, the ultra-militarists in Japan should be given yet another chance to behave themselves.

Australia in those days was governed not from one city but from three. Canberra had the squat, white wedding cake of the temporary Parliament House, opened in 1927, but the bush flies in the new capital outnumbered the public servants. As it had been since Federation, Melbourne was home to the Departments of State, including the Navy Office, and the War Cabinet met there regularly when parliament was not sitting. Sydney, the principal air and sea port, liked to think that it shaded its southern cousin as the bustling commercial capital, although the honours were actually about even. Communications were by telegram, chugging teleprinters or on staticky telephone lines. Weary politicians and their senior bureaucrats were constantly on the move, sometimes by air but
more often by steam train. They would have to change trains at state borders to accommodate the different railway gauges inherited from the colonial era.

In August, a political crisis exploded upon all three cities, and around the nation. Menzies was stabbed in the back by his own United Australia Party and thrown out of office. The tensions had built during his long stay abroad. A final entry in Menzies' diary of his travels records ‘a sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension' as his aircraft neared Sydney. ‘If only I could creep in quietly into the bosom of the family, and rest there,' he wrote.
⁵
His deputy prime minister, Arthur Fadden, leader of the Country Party, who met him at the flying-boat base at Rose Bay, recounted that he ‘seemed as happy as a sailor on a horse'.
⁶
Politics was about to turn nasty.

The Prime Minister's enemies within his own United Australia Party were anything but united. Ministers not given the portfolios they wanted or reshuffled out of them schemed for their leader's downfall. Disgruntled backbenchers plotted in the lobbies and at times went public with their discontent in the newspapers. And Menzies was his own worst enemy. He did not suffer fools gladly. Radiating a patrician grandeur, he could be cruelly condescending to his intellectual inferiors, handing out slights that were not forgiven. As John Curtin once remarked, ‘Ah, poor Bob, it's very sad; he would rather make a point than make a friend.'
⁷

Relishing the turmoil in the government, Labor's more fiery members were all for seizing power at the first chance. Curtin, content to bide his time, stayed their hand. Menzies, reading the writing on the wall, attempted a bold stroke. On 22 August, he wrote to the Labor leader suggesting the formation of an all-party government on the British wartime model. To everyone's astonishment, Menzies said that Labor could have half the Cabinet positions and that he would be prepared to see Curtin become prime minister and to serve as a minister under him.