Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  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

  Steps to find the soldiers for the 6th Division began in the first week of October 1939. The initial intention was to recruit half the force from the militia, a quarter from ex-militiamen or those with other forms of military experience, and the final quarter from men with no previous military training. From the outset, however, such plans were derailed. For a range of reasons – including such issues as memories of the last war; the ‘Phoney War’ in Europe from September 1939 until May the next year, which was marked by a lack of major military operations; alternate avenues of service such as the Empire Air Training Scheme; and Menzies’ call for ‘business as usual’ – there was no 1914-style rush to enlist in the 2nd AIF. By mid-October, only 1200 of 25 000 militiamen in New South Wales had volunteered. Of the 20 000-man target, around 7800 recruits were at hand by the end of the month. By November, only Queensland had met its state enlistment quota,15 and although most other states had caught up a month later, the pace of recruitment had been much slower than had been anticipated. So much for the idea of blind sentimentality and an inescapable connection to Britain, even from the public. In fact in public and in parliament some opponents of the war began using derogatory labels for these volunteers, calling them ‘Menzies’ tourists’, ‘economic conscripts’ or even ‘five-boba-day murderers’.16

  Meanwhile, the issue of whether the 6th Division should eventually be sent overseas, and if so where, remained a serious conundrum for the government. In military terms, any such undertaking represented a serious strategic risk. Unlike any air or naval expeditionary forces, the numbers involved would be high and, depending on where they were sent, the difficulty in getting them home if the British position collapsed or the Japanese threat materialised might be much greater. Potentially, Australia faced the unenviable but real prospect of losing a large proportion of its trained and equipped ground force just when it might be needed most. It was no surprise that September and November 1939 saw considerable political and military debate as to whether the 6th Division ought to be sent anywhere.17 The choice was far from automatic.

  The issue of despatching an Australian expeditionary force overseas if requested by Britain actually pre-dated Menzies’ announcement to raise the 6th Division. As early as 8 September, Anthony Eden, British Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, noted to the British High Commissioner in Australia, Sir Geoffrey Whiskard, that the British government hoped that Australia, in exerting its full national effort, would prepare and despatch an expeditionary force.18 While it was unclear at this stage what form this force might take or where it might be employed, the intent and assumption was clear: from the outset Britain expected Australia to send troops. Equally, from the very beginning, early Australian military and political opinion was guarded. Lieutenant General E.K. Squires, a British officer acting as Chief of the Australian General Staff, believed that the possibility for despatching the 2nd AIF existed, but only when danger of attack on Australia was removed. Squires was supported in this by Menzies, who was similarly cautious about committing Australian soldiers to a faraway theatre of war.19

  The slow transition from an attitude of careful regard for Australian security to one that placed the 6th Division on ships bound for foreign soil began to gather speed towards the end of October 1939, after the fall of Poland earlier that month. Increasing public pressure to despatch ground forces in support of Britain was mirrored by some prominent personalities in London, including Winston Churchill, who (although not yet representative of the official British War Cabinet position) made clear their desire to see Australians ‘in France by spring’.20 At this point R.G. Casey, Australian Minister for Supply and Development, went to London to meet with other Dominion and British officials to clarify Britain’s wishes with regard to the Australian war effort, and to discuss concerns about Japan. Casey’s visit initiated a string of nebulous and unspecific British pledges to underwrite Australian security in exchange for the despatch of troops. The iron-clad guarantee that Casey and Menzies sought, however, could not be given. The truth was that, depending on the fortunes of war, Australia could be sure of neither Britain’s ability nor intention to fulfil any implied promises. The Australian government knew this. If the British were trying to dupe Menzies, they had failed.

  Despite this, so deep-rooted was the idea of imperial defence, and so reliant was Australia on British intelligence estimates of Japanese intentions, that throughout November authorities in Canberra began considering using the 6th Division to relieve British regular troops in Burma, Singapore or India. This would be training before the 2nd AIF entered the European theatre to stand alongside British troops against Germany. At the same time, London applied pressure for the force to go to instead to Palestine to finish its training, and swell British troop numbers there in the hope of deterring Italian aggression, before moving to France.21 Menzies, however, remained hesitant to despatch ground forces anywhere while Japanese intentions remained unknown. The British response to this position grew gradually more pointed, stressing the need for more troops in France and the remoteness of the Japanese threat. Throughout this period the British message was consistently buttressed by advice from Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner in London. In spite of certain personal misgivings about the overly optimistic British picture of the strategic situation in the Pacific (which he saw at least partly coloured by Britain’s desire to get the 6th Division despatched as soon as possible), Bruce was committed to making imperial defence work, and his advice reflected this position.22

  At this point, although the 6th Division was still short of its enlistment target, British lobbying finally bore fruit. On 14 November the Australian service chiefs recommended to Cabinet that the 6th Division be sent to train in the Middle East and that another division also be raised and sent abroad. The timetable for the 6th’s departure was tentatively set as December 1939 or January 1940. However, Menzies still demurred and deferred a decision on the issue to the full Cabinet meeting at the end of November. In the interim, he sought further British guarantees of security and received no shortage of promises in return.23 In parliament, the government came under heated fire from, on the one side, those passionate that everything should be done to answer Britain’s call, and on the other those still stressing the primacy of defending Australia. For the time being, political opposition and doubts about British honesty in its estimations of the Japanese threat, combined with the lack of land fighting in Europe, persuaded Menzies to continue to delay committing the 2nd AIF for overseas service.24

  Once again, policy decisions taken across the Tasman helped force Menzies’ hand. Seemingly far less concerned about Japanese intentions, on 20 November 1939 New Zealand announced its decision to send its own expeditionary force overseas. For a second time Menzies was subject to unfavourable press comparisons and he began to fall into step. Indeed, General Squires was advised that same evening by telephone from the Minister for Defence, Geoffrey Street, to begin preliminary planning for a possible despatch of the 6th Division.25 Three days l
ater, Casey again brought word from London urging an immediate commitment of troops, noting that German propaganda – suggesting that Australia was more interested in wool exports than fighting – was gaining traction in France.26 A conversation between Menzies and Whiskard on the same day as Casey’s cable, however, revealed that even at this late hour the prime minister still harboured considerable misgivings. There was little room left, however, in which he could manoeuvre. On 28 November, Cabinet at last decided that the 6th Division should be sent to Middle East in early 1940, as soon as it had reached a suitable stage in training. Although the decision was attacked vigorously by the Opposition on the grounds that the men were needed to defend Australia, continuing British promises of naval support to Singapore took much of the sting out of the Labor Party’s position.27 Menzies may have had lingering doubts, but under pressure from many fronts, the decision was finally made.

  Controversy surrounding the commitment of the 6th Division to the Middle East did not melt away the moment the government made its announcement. Certainly the decision was sold to the public in terms of imperial safety in that Britain must hold the Mediterranean, not only for its own sake but because its loss would affect other theatres which would directly threaten Australia. Educated observers, however, knew that the situation was not so clear-cut. The battle for France would not be decided by a single Australian division, but at the same time the only full-time and trained formation in Australian might well be crucial in the Pacific. The fact was that the Middle East in the 1940s, despite imperial rhetoric, could only ever be of secondary strategic interest to Australia and there was never any agreement, then or since, on the importance of that theatre to overall Allied strategy.28 Ironically, of all the voices raised against the despatch of the force, those from the army were the most consistent and sober. Squires, an Englishman, personally and consistently stressed the folly of assuming anything but a hostile Japan and the danger of sending troops abroad. As 1939 drew to a close, however, the line of thought he represented was undermined by the tranquillity of the Phoney War and by his replacement, General C.B.B. White, an Australian recently brought out of retirement and a staunch supporter of imperial defence. In any case, the government had made its decision and for the soldiers of the 6th Division, at least, there was no second guessing it.29

  In mid-December 1939, with Britain still confident that Italy was not about to enter the war, a combined advance party of 47 officers and 57 men left Australia aboard the liner Strathallan, with a similar party of New Zealanders, to form an overseas base in Palestine.30 This party was soon followed by the main body of the 6th Division. On 10 June 1940, as the Australians in Palestine trained and German columns pushed deep into France, Mussolini’s declaration of war against Britain took effect. The next day Australia declared itself also at war with Italy. At this point the strategic situation in the Middle East and the tactical situation of the 6th Division changed irrevocably. The 2nd AIF camps in Palestine and Egypt had suddenly fallen within a combat theatre. Instead of training, equipping and steaming to France to fight the Germans, the Australians now faced the very real likelihood of being caught in the middle of an Italian invasion from Libya and the inevitable British defence of Egypt.

  A long string of decisions in Rome, London and Canberra had conspired to place Australian soldiers in the Middle East looking west across the desert towards their Italian counterparts now staring intently eastwards. For the Australians, this decision-making process was lengthy, fought out in parliament and in the press, and at no point was the eventual outcome a ‘sure thing’. The machinations surrounding the commitment of the 6th Division were never as straightforward as proponents of the ‘other people’s war’ idea might suggest. Blind loyalty to Britain certainly did not tip Menzies’ hand. Rather, he was consistently suspicious of British assurances and unswayed by British efforts to shape his decision. The Australian government, on the advice of the Australian military, was also quite conscious of the potential risk posed by Japan. In the end the decision was made according to the established principles of imperial defence – itself a construct not of sentiment but a logical consequence of Australia’s standing security dilemma. Australia policy-makers sent troops abroad in World War II with their eyes wide open. To commit to war in the Middle East on such a basis is simply incompatible with the notion of unwillingly, unwittingly or unnecessarily fighting ‘other people’s wars’.

  The example set by the decision to commit the 6th Division to the Middle East in the early stages of World War II is representative of a consistent historical pattern. Australia’s earliest (colonial) military expeditions to the Sudan (1885) and to South Africa (1899–1902), for example, are cases in point. Proponents of the ‘other people’s war’ myth describe such commitments as instances of Australia foolishly participating in, rather than avoiding, unnecessary foreign wars. In the case of the Boer War, instead of remaining neutral, the six Australian colonies and then the new Commonwealth government sent thousands of troops to fight alongside the British forces against the two Boer republics for no better reason than loyalty to the Queen and sentiment for the Empire – or so the story goes.31 John Mordike goes as far as to suggest that the deployments were the consequence of conspiracies by British officers, in Australia and at home, to make use of expendable colonial manpower in pursuit of imperial policies.32 Such an interpretation, of course, deliberately ignores the complicated reality of Australian rather than imperial identity in this period. In many ways, to suggest a commitment to Britain above and beyond a commitment to purely Australian interests is an entirely false construct. Most Australians at the turn of the century identified themselves not as Australians or subjects of Empire, but both: in Alfred Deakin’s words as ‘independent Australian Britons’. Any distinction between the two is the imposition of a contemporary worldview on an era which would have rejected it as foreign and inappropriate. Such an interpretation also conveniently ignores evidence of much more complex Australian motives, exhaustively researched and fully set out in rigorous works of real military history.33

  In particular, to suggest an expedition to the Boer War was irrelevant to Australian security and strategic positioning is to demonstrate ignorance of the importance of the idea of imperial defence noted earlier in the minds of colonial and early Australian politicians and policy-makers. There was, of course, no chance that a newly federated Australia could defend itself from a large, aggressive foreign power. In this regard, it was entirely dependent on Britain. Imperial defence was an obvious solution. A commitment to assist the Empire wherever and whenever it should was required underwrote the defence of Australia should the day of crisis ever come. In the words of New South Wales political leader Sir John Robertson: ‘if we expect England to stand by us in any trouble we ought to stand by England in her troubles’.34 Put crudely, military expeditions like those despatched to the Boer War – a conflict which neither threatened Australia directly nor endangered the physical security of the Empire as a whole – were premiums on an insurance policy Australia could ill-afford to do without. Public fervour and sentimentality was an important part of Australia’s Boer War, but not at all the essence of the governmental decision-making process. In Geoffrey Blainey’s words: ‘Loyalty to England was paralleled by loyalty to Australia and its own interests: the two loyalties ran side by side’.35 This was our war by rational and calculating choice.

  Many of the same arguments, both for and against the conception of Australia’s participating in ‘other people’s wars’ carry over into World War I. Was it, as some social and cultural historians have contended, more naive folly and blind loyalty to Britain that sent some 60 000 Australians to early graves on battlefields far distant from their homes? Frank Bongiorno and Grant Mansfield have noted how ‘the “other people’s wars” idea persists in popular thought in a way that suggests it speaks to a powerful contemporary sensibility about both war and Australia’s place in the world’.36 They go on to quote a letter-writer in the Australian
newspaper, who contended after Anzac Day in 2006 that ‘Gallipoli – like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – was an act of outright aggression, yet each year hushed schoolchildren are told the Anzacs fought for peace and the defence of Australia, as if Turkey was attacking us’.37

  Again, however, quite apart from the continuing strategic influence of the idea of imperial defence, careful distinction must be made between the flag-waving and emotional rhetoric that encouraged so many Australians to join the expeditions to Gallipoli and France willingly, and the motives and factors influencing their political elites to send them there. No doubt the idea of assisting Britain in an hour of real need – as opposed to the situations encountered in the colonial era and in South Africa – was an intellectual and emotional dynamic that cut across all sectors of the Australian community, but it was only one reason to raise and despatch the 1st AIF. There is no question that Australia had strong financial, trading and strategic reasons for allying itself with Britain in this war. In fact, the decision to support Britain should there be a general war in Europe was essentially made by a succession of Australian governments, of all political persuasions, years before 1914. Had the Allies lost this war, the balance of world power would have been radically altered – to the detriment of Britain and Australia. There is no reason at all to suspect that Australian politicians in the early twentieth century were any less shrewd than those a century later. They well knew the consequences should Britain face defeat, and chose accordingly. Moreover, those questioning the wisdom of committing Australian lives to war in 1914 unsurprisingly often neglect to acknowledge that Germany was, at the time, an emerging Pacific power with fortified harbours, modern wireless stations (including one at Rabaul in German New Guinea) and ‘warships within steaming distance of Sydney, Perth and the crucial Torres Strait’.38 Once again, there was always much more to it than thoughtless loyalty.