September 6, 2015

Finest Hour 168, Spring 2015

Page 28

By By Anne Henderson


Theirs was a relationship bound by its geopolitical umbilical chord—the twentieth-century British Empire. But in 1941 their relationship had been tested. A blitzed Britain faced the threat of falling to Hitler’s Nazi forces, while many Australians (their country providing substantial forces for the North African, Middle East, and Mediterranean campaigns) felt their British chiefs had abandoned them in the Pacific, where the threat from Japan was very real.

It was, indeed, a tyranny of distance.

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“Leadership,” wrote Robert Menzies, “is hard to define. It is something to be felt, rather than analysed.”

It is this “feeling” that is explored here in order to paint something of the world of 1940–41 when Robert Menzies and Winston Churchill encountered their demons. One of them failed to prevail in war—only to rise, phoenix-like, in peace time—while the other made greatness his signature, leading Britain through the valley of death until it could be saved by its late arriving allies.

Robert Menzies became prime minister of Australia as leader of the United Australia Party on 7 April 1939, after the sudden death of his predecessor Joseph Lyons in office on Good Friday. It was not an easy takeover. A bitter faction in the Country Party opposed Menzies’ leadership. It divided the non-Labor parties for most of a year. On accepting the prime ministership, Robert Menzies told Governor General Lord Gowrie that he might last just six weeks as PM.

In Australia, it was a time of division in all major parties. Labor had been divided through most of the 1930s and remained so in New South Wales. The United Australia Party still held together, but a handful of UAP backbenchers, who despised Menzies, destabilised MP ranks until Menzies’ resignation in August 1941. As Menzies took office, a group of Country Party MPs who supported him sat separately from their colleagues who opposed his leadership. 

Churchill, Menzies, AttleeChurchill, Menzies, AttleeYet it was a time of impending war. Unity was needed. Talk of a national government became an issue. To give the flavour of the times, Labor Opposition leader John Curtin rejected the idea of a national government, saying “If there could be anything worse than a government of two parties it would be a government consisting of three parties.” Historian Gavin Souter has written that it would have been even worse to have “a government of three disunited parties.”

Thus, as Australians listened to their prime minister declare war on 3 September 1939, with Australia supporting Britain against Germany, there were many divisions in the political architecture ready to make the job of unifying a country at war a difficult task.

Australian Labor—its extreme left influenced by the Nazi-Soviet pact—opposed sending of troops to the war against Hitler and argued that home defence was the priority. There were heated debates over the proposed establishment of a register of men for national service.

It was a time of uncertainty. Years of financial stress had suddenly been replaced by the return of world war. Australia had recovered financially more quickly than most in the depression years, yet the shadow of the First World War remained. Appeasement had been futile, but it was not easy to accept the answer must be war.

For all that, the Menzies Government survived, even after a devastating air crash in August 1940, just prior to the 1940 election. It killed three of Menzies’ most trusted ministers. The Menzies Government scraped home at the election—left dependent on the votes of two independents. It would last just a year.

Yet, Frederick Shedden, Defence Department chief for both the Menzies and Curtin governments, has recorded that the military success of Labor’s Curtin government, from 1942 onwards, could not have been achieved “but for the foundations laid by the Defence programs of the preceding United Australia Party Governments. Curtin generously acknowledged the inheritance he had received.” I have documented this in my book Menzies at War.

As 1941 dawned, both Churchill and Menzies faced monumental difficulties—both stared at their own personal yawning abyss of uncertainty. Still, in many ways they were polar opposites.

Menzies was the self-made university medallist and champion of the bar, striding like a colossus among parliamentary colleagues of far less intellectual ability; Churchill was the self-promoting and daredevil aristocrat who had scraped into a military academy and was at odds with many of his Conservative colleagues, who saw him as disloyal for attacking them on and off over decades. For many high-ranking Conservatives, Churchill was still just a loathed Asquith Liberal who had changed sides. 

Churchill had also seen war as a fighting soldier over decades and revelled in the contest; Menzies, on the other hand, had been forced to remain at home by his family while his two elder brothers served in the First World War, a fact that was used against him by political opponents.

By late May 1940, Britain and Australia were vastly different in their political perspectives. In Australia, Menzies was grappling with internal dissent in the UAP while national feeling moved between apathy about the war and a feeling that “something must be done.”

In Britain, on the other hand, Churchill headed a national government. But he had only been in the job of PM for a matter of weeks when Britain faced invasion by Germany. At the top, he was also being pressed to strike a deal, tantamount to surrender, with Hitler. Hitler’s forces were redrawing the map of Europe: Paris was about to fall, and the British Expeditionary Force was trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk, in full view of the German Luftwaffe.

The test of character for both Churchill and his followers—at home and across the globe—would be huge. There was no sign until after the Japanese bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbour in December 1941 that the US would send forces to fight Hitler.

It was against this backdrop, Britain preoccupied with its own possible defeat that Menzies, with his own concerns about Australian troops abroad and the uncertainty around the defences at the British base in Singapore, left Australia on 24 January 1941 in a Qantas Empire Flying Boat.

In an extraordinary journey, hopping his way across the top end to Indonesia, Singapore, Rangoon, Calcutta, Karachi, Bahrain, and Basra, to Palestine and thence to Egypt and Libya, after which he had a long flight across the Sahara and southern Africa, then north to Lisbon, Menzies and his team arrived in England on 20 February.

By the time he began his meetings in London, Menzies had as good a picture of the Empire and its war as any other, and possibly a better one than many. But, as Australia’s High Commissioner in London, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, had warned Menzies, Churchill was dominant and persuading him to change his perceptions would be well nigh impossible.

If Churchill had no imagination for the Empire beyond India and its potential peril at the hands of advancing Japanese, then Robert Menzies would be hard pressed to change him. The fate of Singapore was simply not on Churchill’s horizon—he was looking the other way to America. His quest by then was to woo the United States with copious amounts of attention, in the hope it would come to Britain’s aid.

Menzies extended his weeks in London in vain hope. He attended the War Cabinet and became known for his temerity in having a lone voice that occasionally questioned Churchill’s dogmatism. He dined at Chequers on many weekends; he met with senior Whitehall figures, media barons, and business leaders.

He travelled to major cities in the quest for trade deals for Australia’s manufacturing industries, now more isolated and with stiff competition from the United States. He became the darling of some of Churchill’s Conservative critics for his ability to speak up in the War Cabinet. He even visited Prime Minister de Valera in Dublin in the hope of reversing Eire’s refusal to support Britain in the war.

Nothing worked. And as he stayed in Britain, Menzies diarised how his emotions and regard for Churchill swayed from admiration to annoyance. For all his efforts, Churchill did not understand the situation at Singapore or the danger for Britain’s dominions in the Pacific.

By 30 April, Menzies was protesting in the War Cabinet at Churchill not consulting him (“though I was in London!”) regarding advice Churchill should give the US president in relation to moving significant sections of the US Pacific fleet to the Atlantic. As he travelled through Canada on his way home after leaving Britain, Menzies tried to enlist the support of Prime Minister Mackenzie King for an Imperial War Conference in London. He was not successful.

Australian World War II propaganda poster, circa 1944Menzies returned to Australia, only to face the despairing news of the failed Allied campaign in Greece, where Australian forces suffered major casualties, followed by their further defeat at Crete. The Japanese continued to move south, taking Indohina.

As government ministers and the press urged Menzies to return to London for another attempt at persuading Churchill to reinforce Singapore, the Labor opposition. through the National War Advisory Council, would not agree. Losing the support of many Cabinet colleagues, Menzies chose to resign in late August.

It would be the end of Menzies’ role in the war. His administration had committed Australian troops to fight with Britain and set up a war administration his Labor successor John Curtin would thank him for. But Churchill denied him a post in the Empire’s war effort—even though Governor-General Lord Gowrie and the British High Commissioner in Canberra made representations on his behalf. Churchill did not want a stirrer on his watch.

Menzies would rise again by heading up a movement to create a new political party, the Liberal Party of Australia, and taking it to resounding success in December 1949. And Churchill would sleep soundly the night he heard of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, which brought the United States, into the war against both Germany and Japan.

After the war, Menzies and Churchill struck up an elder-statesmen friendship, with Robert and Pattie Menzies making many visits to Chartwell. The two leaders had long since sorted out their differences of 1941.

Those differences originated in separate understandings of the Empire. For Churchill, the Pacific was another universe. Churchill never visited Australia. As Menzies put it in his memoir Afternoon Light: “Of the Far East he knew nothing, and could not imagine it. Australia was a very different country which produced great fighting men, and some black swans for the pond at Chartwell, but it cannot be said that it otherwise excited his imagination.”

For all that, it was their loyalty to and faith in the values and traditions of the Empire that in 1939 drove both Churchill and Menzies in their commitment to fight Hitler.

And as we have long since known, without Churchill’s will and ability to hold the line in 1940, the freedoms of the West, as we know them now, would not have survived.


Anne Henderson is Deputy Director of the Sydney Institute and author of Menzies t War (2014). This article is adapted from a presentation given to the Churchill Centre of Australia, 17 January 2015.

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