April 25, 2015

Finest Hour 119, Summer 2003

Page 46

By Michael McKernan

The Politics of War—Australia at War 1939-1945: From Churchill to MacArthur, by David Day. HarperCollins, 750 pp., $49.95. CBC will place one order; any reader interested should notify The Churchill Centre.


It would be easy to think this book is a tract for the times: a timely return to the story of Australia in World War II to find out how alliance politics works between powerful and less powerful friends. But it isn’t that, although Prime Minister John Howard, who admits to reading Day’s prime ministerial biographies on the long flights to visit George Bush and Tony Blair, might still find in it plenty to ponder.

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Day argues that Australian prime ministers throughout World War II were routinely misinformed, ignored and treated with barely concealed contempt by their alliance partners, particularly Churchill. Day reveals, with example piled upon example, how Churchill simply could not get the idea that the colonies had grown up. The Australian decision to take their remaining troops from the siege at Tobruk, for instance, caused fury in Whitehall and charges of cowardice from the British. In punishment for this exercise of limited Australian independence, Churchill and his cronies seemed to delight in thwarting legitimate expectations of help in Australia’s darkest hour, 1942.

Day also shows with what determination Churchill worked to lure America into the war and how assiduously he then acted to lock Roosevelt into the “Germany First” strategy, conceding only secondary efforts to the Pacific war. Churchill, in Day’s view, was dismissive of Australia’s interests and totally unmoved by Australian fears of an anticipated Japanese invasion.

It could have been more exciting if Day had characterised even some of his cast. We learn about people only through their own words, mainly in cables to one another. But he does not tell us much about who wrote them. We hear of Churchill, the principal actor, as variously affected by liquor, diarrhoea, pneumonia or paranoia, infuriating prissy General Alan Brooke; but Day does not tell us how he sees Churchill. There is no authorial viewpoint.

Minor actors, reintroduced when required to play a part with some repetition, are virtually name-and-rank only. Perhaps because The Politics of War began life in 1981 as a doctoral thesis, many references to the work of other historians come from that era. Perhaps Day has missed how even military historians have lightened up and now produce racier narratives. This is old-fashioned, cable-based history.

With dulling prose Day characterises the Empire Air Training Scheme as a surrender by Australians of the national interest. He brands the retention of Australian airmen in Europe by Churchill as extremely dangerous after Pearl Harbour. Alan Stephens, in contrast, in a recent history of the Royal Australian Air Force, cuts to the chase: he writes of the “dilution of national identity” and the “surrender of national authority” involved in the scheme. He writes of successive Australian governments “conditioned by decades of subservience to Whitehall.” This is direct and punchy. It is not David Day’s style.

But perhaps these are historian’s niggles, so I’ll come clean and admit that my main concern with Day’s book is more fundamental. As I read all these cables of deceit, of half-truth and of politicking, I simply could not get out of my head the central question: what else might Churchill have done?

Britain and her few weak allies had stood up to Hitler in 1940 and 1941 against frightful odds and in the expectation of defeat. Only the intervention of America would swing the war in the allies’ favour and, naturally, Churchill used every trick he could muster to bring the Americans into it. If that meant confusing or possibly deceiving the Australians, then so be it.

The AIF was fighting magnificently in North Africa and stood between Rommel and victory. Why would Churchill meekly surrender such a force without a fight with its government, which had generously and without limitation offered the troops in the first place? What else could he have done but delay, cajole, berate and, possibly, deceive Australian Prime Minister Curtin? Of course, Australians will have sympathy for their PM in the terrible dilemma he faced in 1942; but an Australian perspective was merely one of the ways that Churchill needed to look at the world.

War is an unscripted event and much of what Churchill was doing in 1941 and 1942 was an obvious gamble that might have failed. Aspects of it did. Menzies found Churchill arrogant and authoritarian; but wars aren’t won by Boy Scouts. Curtin could assert that there was an Australian perspective and that Australia was at risk. But he could not make grand strategic decisions.

Today we would expect to hear an independent Australian voice in world affairs, and we would expect a realistic assessment of the risks and benefits of any Australian engagement, diplomatic or military, outside our territory. The Politics of War describes a time when Australia did not have that voice but became, however reluctantly and through necessity, more self-reliant. Times change and the Australian strategic dilemma is redefined for each generation.


Dr. McKernan, former deputy director of the Australian War Memorial, has written several books on the impact of WW2 on Australian society. His review was sent to us by Neil Coates and is reprinted by courtesy of the author and the Sydney Morning-Herald.

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