John Curtin's War, Volume 2 by John Edwards

Author:John Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144241
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

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In Curtin’s mind the Fourth Empire was also associated with restoration of British power in Australia’s region. He wanted Britain back in South-east Asia and the Pacific, less to help in the defeat of Japan than to help secure the region when the war ended. In pursuit of this he went a lot further than he would later think sensible, creating expectations among the British chiefs of staff he would later disappoint. Meeting a visiting British delegation towards the end of 1943 he told them, they reported, that he wanted to see the ‘mother country’ represented in the Pacific. He suggested, the British official historian wrote, ‘a Commonwealth command should be formed in the South West Pacific to partner a revised American command. If British troops could not be spared for the Pacific, the boundaries of the South East Asia Command might be revised to include a part of the South West Pacific and Australian forces placed under Admiral Mountbatten’s command.’20

If he was accurately recorded, it was a sharp turn for Curtin to take. It meant that some or all of Australian forces would be detached from MacArthur’s command and put under Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, with the implication that they might well be used to help reconquer Malaya and Burma, or clear the Japanese from Java or Sumatra. Perhaps he had given little thought to these implications, perhaps he was misreported by his British visitors, perhaps he said more than he intended – but perhaps it was completely accurate and that is exactly what he then thought. The British would take it so. Within a few months Curtin’s views would alter, not least because MacArthur convinced him otherwise. In the meantime, the report of his conversation caused trouble. The British chiefs of staff credited the report, and drew it to Churchill’s attention in late February 1944.21 (Later the boundaries would, indeed, be altered and some Australian forces would come under Mountbatten’s command. Because of the abrupt end of the Pacific War, the consequences were not played out.)

Curtin regressed still further when he spoke at the Australia– New Zealand Conference called by Evatt in early January 1944. The External Affairs Minister’s aim was to exert joint influence on the post-war settlement in the Pacific. Australia and New Zealand called for a conference on post-war political arrangements in the Pacific, asserting not only a right to be heard but to refuse changes with which they disagreed. Both the Americans and the British thought it premature and impertinent. After all, the Pacific War was by no means over and, when it was, America, Britain, Holland, France and China would all want their say. Evatt was unperturbed by the response, as only he could be. Curtin’s speech was more than a little aslant of Evatt’s purposes, though it was not remarked on at the time.

In opening the conference on 17 January 1944, Curtin said it would be of ‘deep significance to the whole structure of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.22 What he then said overturned one of his remarkable achievements.

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