by Brian Toohey
Instead of letting the dead rest in peace, some distant descendants of 200–300 Australian and British soldiers killed in France convinced the Australian government in 2007 to undertake a multimillion-dollar project to dig up the remains at a 1916 group burial site, do DNA tests where possible, and then re-bury them in individual graves in a newly built cemetery. The simplest option—and the most respectful, in the view of many correspondents to newspapers—would have been to erect a commemorative plaque at the site.17 But others successfully argued that identifying the remains was essential to their getting ‘closure’ about the deaths of grand-uncles they never knew.18
Recent political leaders have been keen to rekindle the pride in an Australian warrior culture built around the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915 and later battles in the trenches in France. Prime Minister Julia Gillard claimed in an Anzac Day address, ‘This was our first act of nationhood before the eyes of a watching world.’19 However, the former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Fraser said it was absurd for a country to claim it became a nation by answering the call from another nation to go to a war where its troops were under the ultimate command of generals of that other nation (Britain).20
Australia has been a nation since Federation in 1901, and would have remained one if it had avoided World War I and the terrible suffering that did not stop with the end of the war. Paul Keating gave a powerful rebuttal to Gillard’s claim that World War I made Australia a nation. Speaking at the War Memorial on 11 November 2013, he said, ‘There was nothing missing in our young nation that required a martial baptism of the European cataclysm to legitimise us … We were moving through the processes of Federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness, suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism.’ He said this sense of nationhood brought new resonances—Australian stories and poetry—and new ideas such as Federation architecture.
These were real national achievements, unlike participating in a war where at least 60,000 Australians were officially killed and 156,000 were wounded out of a population of under five million. More recent estimates of the overall casualty numbers are much higher.21
48
WORLD WAR II: NO SOVEREIGN INTEREST IN THE INTEGRITY OF AUSTRALIA
‘The United States was an ally whose aim was to win the war [and who had] no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. [Its purpose] in building its forces in the Commonwealth was not so much from an interest in Australia but rather from its utility as a base from which to hit Japan … The US would be doing it irrespective of the American relationship to the people who might be occupying Australia.’
John Edwards quoting what General Douglas MacArthur told Prime Minister John Curtin in a meeting in Melbourne on 1 June 19421
The most important theatre for Australia in World War II was the Pacific, not Europe, but we agreed to send expeditionary forces to Europe and the Middle East immediately World War II formally began in September 1939. Unlike earlier expeditionary wars, this contribution could be justified initially as a response to Hitler’s invasion of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland—later reinforced by details about his slaughter of six million people in gas chambers.
The Soviet Union played the dominant role in defeating Hitler after he invaded Russia while trying to finish his conquest of Europe and much of the Middle East. The supply of American arms and, eventually, troops also helped. British historian Richard Evans says, ‘The sheer scale of the conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army dwarfed anything seen anywhere else during World War II. From 22 June 1941, the day of the German invasion, there was never a point at which less than two-thirds of the German armed forces were engaged on the eastern front. Deaths on the eastern front numbered more than in all the other theatres of war put together, including the Pacific.2 Hunger inflicted a horrific toll during the 872-day siege of Leningrad. A book by highly regarded Russian historian Sergey Yarov states, ‘While the exact number who died during the siege … will never be known, available data point to 900,000 civilian deaths, over half a million of whom died in the winter of 1941–42 alone3 … When the military deaths in three years of fighting in or near Leningrad are added, the total death toll may have been as high as two million.’4 Soviet soldiers and civilians are commonly estimated to have accounted for over 80 per cent of all German military casualties in World War II, at the enormous cost of at least 26 million Soviet civilians and soldiers dying.
In an essay on the origins of the Pacific War, veteran journalist Max Suich said, ‘Australia was at the very centre of the inflammatory issues that led to war with Japan: disputes over access to raw materials; competition for markets that became a trade war; hostile denunciations and diplomatic exchanges arising from racial pride and imperial alliances.’5 He said Australia was overtly antagonistic to Japan on the international stage as early as 1919, when Prime Minister Billy Hughes publicly humiliated the Japanese government at the postwar Paris Peace Conference by vetoing its request to be formally acknowledged as an equal with the white Anglo-Saxon empires. Suich warned, ‘The hostile, clumsy and rarely coherent polices Australia adopted towards Japan after World War I are exhibiting faint but disturbing parallels with our policies towards China, the new rising Asian giant … China is not the dissatisfied militaristic nation that glorified war and pursued expansionism that Japan was. However, some of the forces at work at that time have their counterparts today.’6
Initially, the Japanese advanced rapidly after their December 1941 invasion of South-East Asia and their attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December that year. After the US commander, General Douglas MacArthur, was forced out of the Philippines, he set up a more secure headquarters in Australia. As quoted above, he left no doubt that his primary mission was not to save Australia’s neck.
Biographer John Edwards says that MacArthur told Prime Minister John Curtin on 1 June 1942 that any appeal now ‘should not be for forces for offensive action but for those necessary to ensure the security of Australia by adequate defence’—a line of thought that Edwards says probably encouraged Curtin to warn of the threat of invasion long after it receded.7
The historian Clem Lloyd reported in the National Times in 1983 that a young historian, David Wilde, had discovered archival records indicating that Curtin deliberately magnified the threat of a Japanese invasion to ensure the survival of his government and boost the bedraggled morale of the Australian people. Lloyd said Wilde’s interpretation was confirmed in part by the newspaper’s own research in the US National Archives in Washington, DC. Wilde concluded that Curtin’s government received highly accurate intelligence ‘which indicated that invasion of Australia was never a probability, even in the early months of 1942 … and never part of Japan’s initial war plans’.8
The notion that the US set out to rescue Australia remains a powerful influence on national thinking, although MacArthur told Curtin on 1 June 1942 that the US was ‘not interested in preserving the sovereign integrity of Australia’.9 Japan’s success in catching the Americans off-guard and the speed of its initial advance have lodged in the minds of many Australians, but big improvements in surveillance technology over the seventy-five years since then should provide ample time to bolster defences against a similar downward thrust in the future.
Australian politicians and war planners relied on British assurances that its large naval base in Singapore would defend Australia. Hindsight is not needed to conclude that the planners recklessly ignored the obvious: defending Singapore would not be a British priority once Britain faced a serious threat in Europe. The War Memorial’s summary of World War II says that over 130,000 troops on Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942, including 15,000 Australians; 7000 of those captured died before the war’s end.10 The collapse of the Singapore garrison was a stunning failure of Australia’s doctrine of forward defence. Had our troops been kept at home for deployment in the South Pacific, far fewer would have been taken prisoner and endured the horror
s of the Sandakan death march and the Thai–Burma Railway.
The War Memorial says thousands of Australian airmen continued to serve in Europe and the Middle East after Japan entered the war. Although more RAAF members fought against the Japanese, losses among those flying against Germany were far higher. Some 3500 Australians were killed in this German campaign, making it the costliest of the war.11 These aircrew could have been brought home immediately after Pearl Harbor to reinforce the Australian troops that had been withdrawn from the Middle East.
A total of 39,000 Australian servicemen and women died in World War II. Over 30,000 were taken prisoner, and two-thirds of these were captured by the Japanese in the first weeks of 1942. While those who became prisoners of the Germans had a strong chance of returning home, 36 per cent of prisoners of the Japanese died in captivity.12
By 1944, the Japanese navy was almost destroyed and its air force had been crippled, but forty army divisions were still tied down in China and Manchuria by local resistance fighters, compared to twenty-three divisions trying to resist the American advance through the Pacific, and another nineteen divisions that were occupied in South-East Asia.13 Without the efforts of the resistance fighters in China and Manchuria in particular, the Japanese could have put up a far more formidable fight against the advancing Americans. This tremendous contribution from Japan’s Asian opponents is often overlooked in discussions about the role the US and Australia played.
Almost one million Australian men and women served in World War II out of a population of seven million. Australian industry supplied huge quantities of food, medicine, clothing and other support to Australian and American troops. Although US naval and air support was valuable in securing supply lines in the south-west Pacific, Defence analyst Andrew Ross makes a strong case that Australia’s own forces would have mounted a formidable defence against any feasible Japanese invasion.14 Referring to the Allied war effort in a report to Congress in December 1946, President Harry S. Truman said, ‘On balance, the contribution made by Australia, a country having a population of about seven million, approximately equaled [that of] the US.’15 An impressive industrial base in 1942 quickly began mass-producing ammunition, explosives, rifles, machine guns and big artillery pieces, as well as large numbers of fighter planes and ships. By the end of the war, local industry had built 2000 combat aircraft.
It’s debatable whether Australian industry today could produce an equivalent effort, particularly when modern fighter planes are so complex.16 However, with a current population of 25 million, claims that Australia couldn’t raise sufficient troops to defend the country make little sense, particularly as modern surveillance techniques should be able to provide a much longer warning time than in 1942.
Following the war, External Affairs Minister Bert Evatt and his departmental head, John Burton, wanted a bigger diplomatic and economic focus on Asia, but in 1949 this held no appeal for the incoming Coalition PM, Bob Menzies. Burton, the son of a Methodist minister and a Christian himself, headed External Affairs between 1947 and 1950. He was a significant strategic thinker who opposed communism and supported independence for Indonesia and other colonies as being in Australia’s long-term interest. The historian David Fettling says, ‘Burton became the foremost champion in Australian government of a national reorientation to Asia … [His] strongly pro-Republican stance to the Indonesian crisis was coupled to a vision of Asia-wide political independence combined with economic growth and state-centred development … Burton’s fundamental objective was to attain security and stability in Australia’s immediate region, including from communist insurrections: in this way he was an exemplar of, not an exception to, the long Australian “search for security”.’17
After Burton died in 2010, the ANU professor of strategic studies Des Ball smeared him and Evatt as Soviet spies. Without any supporting evidence, Ball wrote in 2011 that he was more than ever convinced that ‘Evatt and Burton were witting parties to the Soviet espionage operations in Australia’.18 He stated unequivocally that Burton had ‘lied’ to the Petrov royal commission about the date he first met Jim Hill, who had been accused of spying. When one of Burton’s daughters, Pam, correctly told Ball that the date he was citing from the royal commission transcript referred to something else, he switched to saying his source was ‘too secret’ to be revealed.19 She then pointed out that Ball had quoted from the public transcript of evidence, and noted that the head of MI5, Roger Hollis, had recorded in the file that Burton was not an espionage agent and had been very cooperative (in helping to improve security).
A lawyer and former senior public servant, Ernst Willheim, also rebutted Ball’s claims in detail and asked, ‘Would Dennis Richardson, as head of DFAT and the former ASIO head, have provided a glowing tribute on Burton’s death if he had harboured the slightest suspicion Burton was a traitor?’20 Willheim says David Horner, who wrote Volume 1 of the official ASIO history, told him he had found no evidence that Burton was a spy.
Despite his ideas being rejected by Menzies, Burton’s diplomatic legacy didn’t vanish without trace, not least because it reflected the reality of Australia’s geographic location. Bill Pritchett, who joined External Affairs in 1945 and retired as Defence head in 1984, wrote that it would have been better when World War II ended ‘if we had not become caught up with Britain and the US, but had to make our own way in Asia’.21 Paul Keating, as Labor PM in the mid-1990s, argued that Australia should seek its security in Asia, not from it. Nevertheless, the dominant policy thrust since 1949 has been to seek security in ever-closer ties with the US.
49
KOREA: BARBARISM UNLEASHED
‘Three months after it started, the North Korean invasion had been repulsed and the mandate of the UN achieved. The war should have been over … Washington’s ideological and military enthusiasm ensured a wider and more substantial conflagration—continuing the war for nearly three more years. Civilian deaths are estimated to have been over 3 million.’
Michael Pembroke1
Korea suffered terribly during the twentieth century. First, Japan brutally occupied it from 1910 until surrendering in 1945. Then, although the Korean people wanted to remain a unified country, World War II’s victors presumed the right to divide it among themselves. The Soviet Union became responsible for administering north of the 38th parallel and the US below that line, based on the understanding that a unified Korea would be able to govern itself in a few years. Soviet troops withdrew in 1948, never to return, leaving Kim Il Sung as dictator. In the south, Syngman Rhee was a slightly less repressive dictator. US troops withdrew in 1949, but returned in 1950 and remain there.
There were cross-border raids by each side before 1950, but the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was reluctant to back Kim’s proposals to reunify the country by invading the south. He eventually agreed on the condition that no Soviet troops be involved. The northern forces crossed the 38th parallel into the south on 25 June 1950, but the Soviets didn’t veto a UN Security Council resolution on the same day calling on the north to withdraw. Two days later the UN recommended the South be given assistance ‘to repel the armed attack and restore international peace and security to the area’. It passed two resolutions in July to establish what was later called a UN Command to conduct the military operation, but gave no authorisation to invade the north once North Korea’s troops were pushed back to the 38th parallel.
In his 2018 book on Korea, historian and NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Pembroke says the sole purpose of the UN’s collective intervention ‘was to rebuff the invasion … to restore the integrity of the border. The appropriate legal and moral response, and the only one authorised by the UN, was to stop North Korean aggression, halt and defeat it, but not to become an aggressor oneself.’ 2 However, the US had no intention of stopping at the 38th parallel when it saw an opportunity to prise North Korea away from the Sino-Soviet bloc.
On 28 June 1950, only three days after the initial invasion, the Menzies Government became the second nation
to commit naval, army and air units to the conflict. The external affairs minister, Percy Spender, pushed Australian participation through Cabinet ‘while Menzies, who at that stage opposed sending troops, was incommunicado on the high seas between London and Washington’.3 The NAA’s notes on Australia’s prime ministers say, ‘In the privacy of Cabinet, Menzies conceded that while the electorate was being told the troops were being sent to assist the UN, in fact they had been committed to secure Australia’s relationship with the US.’4 As has become standard practice, Australia went to war to please the Americans.
Pushing the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel was clearly justified under the UN Charter’s prohibition of aggression, but once the US took the war above the 38th parallel, it was a different matter. Yet the Menzies Government never reviewed its initial commitment.
On 7 October 1950, the UN passed a resolution that the head of Australia’s External Affairs Department, Alan Watt, warned was so loosely worded that it could be interpreted as allowing UN forces to go past the 38th parallel.5 The headstrong General Douglas MacArthur, who led the UN command, soon did so, pushing on to Yalu on the border with China. Despite China’s desperate poverty, Mao Zedong was determined to stop what he saw as a US attempt to threaten his country by controlling North Korea. At the time, the Soviets were still confronting the devastation of World War II, in which 26 million Russians had died. Stalin still refused to provide any troops, but later supplied some MiG-15 fighter planes and lent China money to buy other weapons.
China initially infiltrated 200,000 troops into North Korea without the US detecting what was happening. Many more would soon join them. The troops lacked air cover much beyond the Chinese border and had only basic weaponry and flimsy boots in freezing cold, but the US soon learnt that the Chinese troops did not lack courage, endurance or ingenuity. They routed the US-led forces, forcing them back below the 38th parallel.
