Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  At the outset of World War II, in addition the decision to despatch another expeditionary force of Australians overseas to fight what appeared at the time to be another vast and costly European conflict, many Australians were also committed to the air war over Europe as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme, while the Royal Australian Navy placed as a more or less subordinate component of the Royal Navy. These air and sea commitments were justified under the same imperial defence rubric. Defeating Germany and the Axis powers most certainly did matter for Australia. Few would be so naive to suggest that a triumph of the Nazi worldview and polity would not have impacted Australians, for the worse. With the war so clearly seen, at the time and now, as a battle for the preservation of a liberal democratic values over an alternate an abhorrent alternative, in what way could this conflict be labelled ‘someone else’s war’?

  All of this, of course, relates to the war in Europe and the Mediterranean. Those ascribing to the idea of habitual Australian involvement in wars better left alone often avoid a discussion of the Pacific War in its entirety. If it is acknowledged, then effort is usually made to artificially separate the Pacific from the wider conflict, as if they were not closely connected and integral aspects of the same war. The most obvious reason is that this aspect of World War II tends to contradict the ‘other people’s wars’ paradigm. Certainly, for around six months in late 1941 and early 1942, the war was perceived by the Australian government and public as a battle for national survival. It is true, however, that the government, for pragmatic political reasons, declined to disavow the population of this idea for some time after it knew the real threat had passed. It is also true that historians are now well aware that Australia was never under threat of physical invasion: it was never an option that the Japanese government ever seriously considered and certainly not one they were ever going to be put into action.39 Indeed, such an operation was always well beyond over-stretched Japanese logistic and operational capabilities so long as it remained in conflict with the United States. The point, however, is that for at least a short period the threat was perceived in Canberra as being immanent and dire. The Pacific theatre, by no stretch of the imagination, can not seriously be considered as anything but Australia’s war.

  The tradition of rational, cost-benefit calculations continued after 1945. There was no sudden lurch to uncritically and automatically accede to the demand of powerful allies in the face of ‘real’ Australian interests. The Korean War, for example, began on 25 June 1950 when North Korean forces launched an invasion of the South. Within 48 hours, the United States had offered air and sea support to South Korea, and the United Nations Security Council asked all its members to assist in repelling the North Korean attack. Twenty-one countries responded by providing troops, ships, aircraft and medical teams. Australia’s contribution included an Air Force squadron and, initially, a battalion of infantry, both of which were already stationed in Japan as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. As the Korean War progressed, while some countries were keen to extricate their troops, Australia increased its commitment, and the government sent a second battalion, which joined the Commonwealth Division on 1 June 1952. By the time the war ended in July 1953, total Australian casualties numbered more than 1500, with 339 killed.

  Seemingly so far from Australia and Australian interests, Korea still fails to give substance to the ‘other people’s wars’ contention. First, it is difficult to argue that blind sentiment and loyalty underwrote the deployment when the Australian public reaction to news of the war, and throughout its course, was distinctly subdued. Moreover, a military commitment had been requested by the United Nations, an organisation that Australia had had a substantial hand in establishing, and had a significant interest in strengthening. At its heart was the idea of ‘collective security’ – the concept in a military sense that an attack on one member was to be viewed as an attack on all members. This was seen as the time as a key answer to Australia’s (post-imperial) strategic dilemma. Should the concept work in practice it would guarantee the security of this nation and other small-to-medium countries across the globe. It would certainly not succeed if, at its first test, nations like Australia failed to heed the call. A deployment to Korea was thus in every sense in line with Australian national interests. Not surprisingly, it received consistent bipartisan political support.

  Throughout the same period, Australia also committed troops to the Malayan Emergency, declared in June 1948 after three British estate managers were murdered in Perak, northern Malaya, by guerrillas of the Malayan Communist Party. Following the murder of the British High Commissioner in October 1951, Whitehall’s resolve was galvanised and the Malayan government stepped up counter-insurgency measures. Australia’s involvement began in 1950 with the arrival of transport and bomber aircraft. By October 1955, an infantry battalion was sent to Penang, to participate in a lengthy ‘mopping up’ of guerrillas. By late 1959, operations against the communists were in their final phase and many had crossed Malaya’s northern border into Thailand. As the threat continued to dissipate, the Malayan government officially declared the emergency over on 31 July 1960, although Australian soldiers remained until August 1963. Thirty-nine Australian servicemen were killed in Malaya – although only 15 of these occurred as a result of combat – and another 27 were wounded.

  Australian forces in Malaya formed part of this nation’s contribution to the Far East Strategic Reserve, which was set up in April 1955 primarily to deter external communist aggression (particularly from China) against countries in South-East Asia, including Malaya and Singapore.40 Within a Cold War context, the emergency was in all aspects perceived at the time in Canberra and London as a struggle against the danger of Communist expansion in the region. Sensitive to a perceived Communist threat to its north, the Australian government was a willing participant. No wave of emotional delusion swept Australian policy-makers along. No British lies or coercion forced Australian hands. This was seen as a regional problem that demanded regional action.

  The same may well be said of the Confrontation with Indonesia from 1962 to 1966. This small, undeclared war, which came to involve troops from Australia and Britain, was sparked by President Sukarno’s conclusion that Malaysia – a nation born of a federation of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore in September 1963 – represented an attempt by Britain to maintain colonial rule in the region. The actual war began when Indonesia launched a series of cross-border raids into Malaysian territory in early 1963. Requests from both the British and Malaysian governments in 1963 and 1964 for the deployment of Australian troops in Borneo met with initial refusal, although the Australian government did agree that its troops could be used for the defence of the Malay Peninsula against external attack. Such attacks occurred twice in 1964 and Australian troops were used in mopping-up operations against the invading troops. Although these attacks were easily repelled, they did pose a serious risk of escalating the fighting. The Australian government thus relented in January 1965 and agreed to deploy a battalion in Borneo. Continuing negotiations between Indonesia and Malaysia ended the conflict, and the two sides signed a peace treaty in Bangkok in August 1966. Twentythree Australians were killed during the Confrontation, seven of them on operations, and another eight wounded.

  Australia’s commitment to operations against Indonesia during the Confrontation in Borneo and West Malaysia again fell within the context of its membership in the Far East Strategic Reserve. Like the Malayan Emergency, it represented a regional crisis with clearly perceived security ramifications for Australia. It was certainly not sentimentality or blind loyalty which sent Australian troops into harm’s way. Nor was it public opinion: because of the sensitivity of the cross-border operations (which remained secret at the time), the Confrontation received very little coverage in the Australian press. Nor was it British pressure, for the Australian government turned down desperate pleas for help from both London and Kuala Lumpur for a considerable time. Shrewd calculation of Australian
interests then, as always, steered the nation to war.

  On a larger scale and much more controversial was the Australian military commitment to Vietnam from 1962 to 1973, in which almost 60 000 Australians served, including Air Force and Navy personnel. Some 521 died as a result of the war and over 3000 were wounded. It is well known that the Vietnam War was the cause of some of the most significant social and political dissent in Australia since the conscription referendums of the World War I. Much, subsequently, has been written about the decision to send troops, including conscripts, to fight in this war. Many in the anti-war movement at the time, along with a range of other commentators, have long signalled their moral and practical disquiet at Australia’s participation in what has come to be seen in some quarters as an ‘aggressive’ war. As Garry Woodard, former Australian Ambassador to China and High Commissioner to Malaysia, pointed out in 2004 in Asian Alternatives: Australia’s Vietnam Decision and Lessons on Going to War, the Australian government could have quite reasonably chosen a different path.41 Moreover, even prominent Australian military figures like General Peter Cosgrove, former chief of the Australian Defence Force, have questioned the decision to go ‘all the way with LBJ’. Cosgrove, who won the Military Cross in Vietnam, said in 2002 that the ‘weight of history and analysis’ was against the decision to commit troops. ‘On reflection’, he continued, ‘I’d probably join the majority of Australians who thought in retrospect our involvement was not going to be successful … we probably shouldn’t have gone’.42

  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.43

  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 the
ir 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.