An old newspaper can work like a telescope into the past, the details sharp but the whole picture a little shaky and blurred, and the newspaper on my wall is like that. It’s the front of the Melbourne Argus for Sunday, September the third, 1939, and it contains only one story, told in a series of blaring headlines.
BRITAIN AT WAR
DECLARED AT 8.20 P.M.
‘OUR CONSCIENCE CLEAR’ – MR CHAMBERLAIN
LONDON, TO-NIGHT
A DECLARATION THAT A STATE OF WAR EXISTED BETWEEN BRITAIN AND GERMANY WAS MADE BY THE PRIME MINISTER, MR CHAMBERLAIN, TO THE NATION FROM NO. 10 DOWNING STREET TO-NIGHT.
The headlines tumble forth, all the way down the front page, until, almost as an afterthought, the final sentence: “Immediately that the announcement was received from England , the Prime Minister (Mr Menzies) formerly (sic) declared that Australia was formally at war with Germany”.
The seventieth anniversary of that extraordinary day is almost upon us, and it set me wondering about those times, when Melburnians were paying a penny-ha’penny for a special edition of a newspaper, while reading advertisements for Elliott’s Ginger Beer (“They’re The Tops”) and Lawrence French Dry Cleaning (three shillings and sixpence for “suits, plain frocks and costumes”).
So much of it is gone, after all; the pounds-shillings-and-pence prices are in a currency which no-one much under fifty would recognise, and the Melbourne Argus itself –with its masthead reading “Incorporating “The Daily News”, which absorbed “The Port Phillip Patriot”, successor to the Melbourne Advocate”, first published January 1, 1838, itself ceased to exist fifty-two years ago.
To put September 1939 in another perspective: it was only twenty-five years after the beginning of the ‘Great War’, the ‘War To End All Wars’ – and only five years after the worst of the Great Depression.
So what was this country’s state of mind when Mr Menzies took Australia so speedily into Britain’s war?
It was certainly not a state of surprise, according to historian Dr Karl James, of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Australians had become addicted to news over the previous year or two – effectively since the Munich crisis, when the British and French Prime Ministers gave Hitler the go-ahead to annex part of Czechoslovakia .
“‘Special’ and ‘Extraordinary’ editions of papers like the Argus had become pretty common since Munich” says Dr James. “And radio listeners were used to hearing broadcasts interrupted for urgent news bulletins”.
So we may imagine hundreds of thousands of listeners glued to their radios (still called “wireless sets”, of course), as Menzies made his speech which you can listen to here.
But why was Australia’s declaration of war so speedy, almost automatic? Hitler had invaded Poland, half a world away, and the Japanese to our north, while threatening, were still two years away from entering the war. Besides, Australia was scarcely ready.
Take the Navy as an example; a personal example, as it happens, because it was under the command at the time of my grandfather, a British Admiral.
He had come here in 1937 with the task of rebuilding Australia’s naval forces: a very large task indeed, because the Depression had reduced the R.A.N. almost to nothing.
The naval historian Tom Frame told me: “Ships and their maintenance were expensive. By 1933, the Navy was down to just four .. (sea-going) .. ships and three thousand men”.
That solves a question I’d always wondered about: why a British admiral should be sent out to command Australia’s Navy. The answer, according to Tom Frame: the force was so depleted that there simply weren’t enough experienced Australian officers to do the job.
By September 1939,the process of trying to rectify that had only just begun. It took two years and a lot of money to build a ship. The economy was still shaky. And there was still huge debate over whether the country even needed to re-arm.
One reason was appeasement, a word people seldom use, in hindsight, without a sneer. But many of the appeasers were people who had been through hellish experiences at Gallipoli and the Somme, and sincerely believed that “Mr Hitler” could not possibly want another European war. Their voices in politics were loud, and on both sides of the left-right divide.
Another possible reason was a deeper political rift.
On the Left, some Australians believed that, because Hitler had made a non-aggression pact with Stalin, the interests of international workers would not be served by going off to Europe or the Middle East to serve in a war against Stalin.
So why did Menzies’ announcement, seventy years ago next month, cause relatively little stir?
One new interpretation comes from Gough Whitlam’s former speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, in his new book ‘Churchill and Australia’.
Acknowledging that the speech has been painted as the supreme example of Menzies’ “British to the bootstraps” attitude, Freudenberg says it would actually have come as almost providential to the Labor leader, John Curtin.
“Menzies, in effect, presented Curtin with a fait accompli, and Curtin accepted it with relief”, writes Freudenberg.
In the eight hours of a high-standard debate in Federal Parliament, he continues, “neither Curtin nor any of the other Opposition speakers contested Menzies’ basic proposition that Australia was at war because Britain was at war …. Even Eddie Ward, the Labor firebrand from East Sydney … did not object …. Menzies had effectively got Curtin off the hook”.
September the third 1939 was only (to borrow a phrase of Churchill’s) the beginning of the beginning. Little happened at first; there was no great “rush to the colours” as there had been at the start of World War One, and it would be some time before any sort of austerity measures were introduced on the Home Front. As in Britain, it was the “Phoney War.”
But the nation was now officially on a war footing. The Government could start issuing war bonds, enough to raise the cash to build up the Navy to its final wartime strength of 337 ships and nearly 40,000 men.
Within two years Menzies himself was gone from the Prime Ministership, replaced by John Curtin, whose political life he’d almost unwittingly saved.
History’s telescope shows us all this, but it reminds us too, of how very long ago it all was.
The generation of ’39 had only gone for 21 years without a world war. Notwithstanding Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we have had 64.
Worth remembering that on September the third.
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