John Curtin, Winston Churchill and the cable that changed the course of Australian history

Mercifully, this cloying official obsequiousness to Britain would not last, and Curtin was the man who ended it, horrified that Australia’s loyalty to Britain in extremis had not been returned in kind.

No matter that Australia had lost 60,000 men killed in WWI in the service of Britain, and that at the outbreak of the Second World War Australia had promptly sent two full divisions of men, (including my father, Lieutenant P.M. FitzSimons, 2/4th Ak-Ak) to fight beside Britain in the Middle East to defend British interests. Now, it seemed to Curtin, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour and the threatened fall of Singapore, when Australia was in need, Britain was missing in action.

But Churchill’s views had been set in stone when, on November 22, 1940, he sent a memo to his First Sea Lord, insisting that there be a concentration of “all possible naval and military aid in the European field, [my italics] to the exclusion of any other interest … This would involve … abandonment of any attempt to reinforce the Far East.”

And us in Australia, Prime Minister Churchill, in the Far East and facing the rising Japanese threat? We were on our own. Curtin felt that Churchill was abandoning us to purely British and more favoured colonial interests.

In early 1942, Curtin cabled his wife Elsie in Perth that “The war goes very badly and I have a cable fight with Churchill almost daily. He has been in Africa and India and they count before Australia and New Zealand.”

The cables kept coming, building to a climax as Singapore fell on February 15, 1942, and Darwin was bombed by the Japanese four days later.

In these “cable fights”, Churchill tried to soothe Curtin, maintaining that Australia was in minimal danger. But in private the English leader was scathing, claiming that the Australians were “jumpy about invasion” because they came from “bad stock”, according to David Day in The Politics of War.

No, really.

The biggest issue between the leaders concerned the Australian troops of the Sixth and Seventh Divisions then on the Indian Ocean and heading east, from North Africa to Australia. Churchill wanted them diverted to Burma to defend the jewel in Britain’s colonial crown, India, against a western Japanese thrust – while also putting garrisons in Ceylon and Java.

Curtin, call him crazy, wanted Australia’s finest sons to return to Australia. In an effort to convince Curtin, Churchill even engaged the support of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sent cables to the Australian leader agreeing with the British prime minister’s line of reasoning. (It was explained to Roosevelt that Australia was a sovereign nation, and Curtin was quite within his rights.)

Even Australia’s representative to the United Kingdom, Earle Page – our own man – told Churchill that he would endeavour to change Curtin’s mind, and indeed tried to do so. Curtin’s reported comment in response to Page’s recommendation was one for the ages: “There are numerous geographical centres where an AIF or any other division would be useful,” he said, but from the viewpoint of Australia, “there is none east of Suez of greater importance than Australia [itself].”

Finally, the climax …

For, extraordinarily – believing himself to be the leader of the forces of the British Empire, and that was authority enough – Churchill gave orders to the British troopships to divert the Australian troops to Burma anyway, only informing Curtin 24 hours after the event.

Curtin, shocked that it had come to this, needed time to think. So he went for a long walk around Canberra’s Mount Ainslie. It was, in fact, so long that his key adviser on defence issues, Frederick Shedden, organised for messages to be put up on screens in the city’s theatres around Canberra, broadly saying, if you are the Prime Minister, phone home. Curtin did return, just after midnight, and sent the cable which fully affirmed Australia’s right as a sovereign nation to determine where its own troops would be sent.

“Australia’s outer defences are now quickly vanishing and our vulnerability is completely exposed,” he wrote flatly to Churchill. “We feel a primary obligation to save Australia.”

This cable has been called Australia’s informal Declaration of Independence.

Curtin won the day, even if he did allow two brigades of the Sixth Division to stay in Ceylon as a temporary garrison. The rest of the convoy headed home, home to Australia, to the manifest relief of the troops themselves. And of course, those same Australian troops did go on to defend Australia, in the battles of Milne Bay, Kokoda and all the rest.

Through those battles, Curtin was resolute, and even summoned what I would call Churchillian language, in assuring the Americans in a subsequent radio broadcast of March 1942: “The Anzac breed will trade punches with the Japanese, until we rock the enemy back on his heels. [No matter which way the battle turns] there will still be Australians fighting on Australian soil until the turning point be reached, and we will advance over blackened ruins through blasted and fire-swept cities, across scorched plains, until we drive the enemy into the sea.”

And so the Australians did, though mercifully not on Australian soil.

That was who John Curtin was – the great leader who Anthony Albanese is likely to be honouring in his Anzac Day address at Isurava. He was a great leader of his country, of his people, who came from modest beginnings and rose to be a truly great Australian, prioritising Australian interests — and the people loved him for it.

At his funeral in Canberra in 1945, there was pomp and ceremony befitting a great PM who had died in office, and two of his pallbearers were Artie Fadden and Robert Menzies. Just after they had put the coffin down on the gun carriage Menzies said to Fadden, “I don’t want all this fuss when I go, Artie.”

“Don’t worry,” Fadden assured him. “You won’t get it.”

All these years on, it is wonderful to see what Curtin accomplished more than 80 years ago in moving us towards actual independence, being recognised – and what better place to honour this than in a speech honouring the Kokoda campaign, on the holy soil of Isurava, on Anzac Day?

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

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