Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  For the first time in the history of Australian–New Zealand joint military co-operation, dating back over 50 years to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, infantry soldiers of the two nations were officially combined into a single battalion to fight side-by-side under a common name and in a common cause.52

  ‘Bonds of comradeship’ and ‘a shared military tradition’ may have counted for something in this case, but it could not prevent an ‘amicable rivalry’ from developing even here, with both sides considering themselves superior in their operating methods in the field. The New Zealanders found cause for complaint (once again) in the ‘brash behaviour’ of the Australians, and whenever they felt that their identity was being submerged or they were treated like ‘poor relations’. For their part, the Australians based their attitude to their trans-Tasman colleagues on the reputation that Maori soldiers had acquired for serious indiscipline whenever they were within the task force base camp, which led to the Kiwis being assigned extra time in the bush on patrol.53

  A decade after the Vietnam experience, Australian and New Zealand military elements were again brought together in a joint enterprise which bore, in a fashion, the Anzac mantle. On this occasion, however, the role was peacekeeping rather than war, and the forces involved were not mainly army. In 1981 the two countries agreed to provide a combined helicopter unit to support the US-led Multinational Force and Observers to monitor the provisions of the 1978 Camp David accord, and the peace treaty signed the next year, which returned the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. When deployed in March 1982, the Rotary Wing Aviation Unit consisted of eight Iroquois and 99 personnel from the RAAF, and a New Zealand contingent of two more Iroquois (leased from the US Army) and 36 personnel. Operating from El Gorah in the north-eastern Sinai, about 20 kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast, the unit – informally known as ‘Anzac Airlines’ – first took to the air on Anzac Day 1982. Within weeks of arriving, the two contingents had also set up an all-ranks bar known as the ‘Anzac Surf Club (Sinai)’, which came complete with surf boards.54 For the next three years this composite unit of Australians and New Zealanders clearly saw themselves as continuing a hallowed tradition: they even took the ‘ANZAC’ name for themselves – although in this instance the acronym was held to stand for ‘Australia and New Zealand Air Contingent’.55

  Co-operation between Australian and New Zealand military forces continued despite the upset caused in the mid-1980s by New Zealand’s abrogation of the ANZUS Treaty over the issue of visiting nuclear ships. In March 1987, after the navies of Australia and New Zealand identified a requirement for a new generalpurpose frigate, both countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding for what became known as Anzac frigate project. As was often the case with the Anzac connection, this joint agreement did not meet universal acclaim, despite the fact that arrangements for sharing the modular construction of the new vessels meant work for shipyards on both sides of the Tasman.56 By the mid-1990s there was considerable controversy in New Zealand due to perceptions in sections of the community and body politic that ‘Australia was forcing New Zealand into buying more expensive ships than the country needed’.57

  While such ructions caused problems from time to time within the Anzac partners’ armed forces, they were still capable of working together at an operational level. New Zealand contributed a battalion group to the Australian-led intervention in East Timor from 1999 to 2002, and the two countries have also been joined together in the International Stabilisation Force which returned to East Timor in 2006 under arrangements which have seen command vested in an Australian Army officer, deputy command with a New Zealander. During the changeover of command in Dili in July 2011, the outgoing Australian officer was quoted as saying, ‘It is a privilege to have led the combined Australian and New Zealand Force that performed in the true spirit of the ANZAC legend forged so many years ago’.58 This was a fine and noble sentiment, but one is left to wonder whether those uttering such words understood the full background to the tradition they were embracing.

  And if the top brass seem to have an overly rosy impression, several recent efforts to memorialise the Australian–New Zealand connection on Australian soil also appear misinformed. One such commemoration, apparently the result of a local initiative, saw Sydney’s recently constructed Glebe Island Bridge renamed the ‘Anzac Bridge’ in 1998. An Australian flag flies atop its eastern pylon with a New Zealand flag from the western pylon, and a bronze memorial statue of an Australian soldier placed at the western end of the bridge was followed in 2008 by a similar statue of a New Zealand counterpart directly across the road – both statues by the same New Zealand sculptor. At the dedication of the second statue, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced that the original bronze Australian was now ‘joined by his mate, symbolising the extraordinary and close friendship between New Zealand and Australia in times of war and peace’.59

  In the meantime, the New Zealand Memorial was also dedicated on Anzac Parade in Canberra – on 24 April 2001. One commentator more cautiously observed that ‘The memorial gives rise to a range of possible meanings’ and suggested ‘it is the clean, consensual collective memory that is being assisted by this memorial, the seemingly unproblematic ANZAC relationship’. An interpretive plaque nearby states that its purpose is to commemorate ‘the unique friendship between New Zealand and Australian people’, yet everything about the memorial – from its position in the heart of Australia’s national capital, to the inclusion of inscriptions of battlegrounds where the men and women of both countries have fought together on foreign soil, along with buried boxes of earth from two of those contested fields at Gallipoli (Chunuk Bair and Lone Pine) – serves to proclaim that this is specifically a war memorial.60 If nothing else, the memorial stands as a visible and irrefutable reminder, to any Australian who may be inclined to forget, that New Zealanders were also Anzacs – not just Australians – and the Anzac tradition is not the national possession of Australia alone.

  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 th
reat 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.