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130 Peter Edwards 130 CHAPTER 6 Churchill, Singapore and Australia’s Strategic Policy Peter Edwards Australians have long been ambivalent towards Winston Churchill. His courage and leadership during Britain’s, and his, finest hour have been fully recognised; his reputation as perhaps the greatest statesman of the 20th century seldom challenged. Australians were among the most generous donors to the Churchill Trust that established the Churchill Fellowships.1 But alongside these positive attitudes have been currents of reservation, at times open hostility, which have left their mark even into this century. If one had to distil the reasons for those negative attitudes into two words, they would be Gallipoli and Singapore. To many Australians, April 1915 and February 1942 represent the sacrifice of Australian men because of bad strategic planning, some would say bad faith, on the part of the British politico-military establishment in general and of Churchill in particular. In Australian popular history, a frequently heard myth links Churchill, Australia and the fall of Singapore. Most commonly voiced by Australian Labor Party sympathisers, but by no means confined to them, it goes like this. The Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, who stood up for Australian interests unlike his predecessor, the arch-imperialist Robert Menzies, exchanged a series of terse and bitter cables with Winston Churchill in late 1941 and early 1942. In these, Curtin demanded, and finally succeeded in gaining, the return of Australian troops from the Middle East to defend Australia against the Japanese threat. He also denounced the incompetence and bad faith surrounding the defence of Malaya and Singapore, at one point telling Churchill that one proposed action would constitute an “inexcusable betrayal” of Australia. Churchill was, of course, infuriated Churchill, Singapore and Australia’s Strategic Policy 131 but Curtin’s stand, according to the popular account, was not only brave, but right. Curtin became so disillusioned with Britain that he made his famous statement that “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to its traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom”. He established a close relationship with General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of allied forces in the South West Pacific Area. This, according to the longstanding myth, was the origin of the Australian-American alliance, which has been the foundation of Australia’s foreign and defence policies ever since. Historians have challenged this simplistic interpretation from a number of different directions for nearly 40 years, but it retains a strong hold on the Australian public mind and variations on this theme are still common. This chapter will approach it from a different direction, reassessing the place of the fall of Singapore in February 1942, and the association of Winston Churchill with that catastrophe, in the long-term development of Australian strategic policy, between the 1920s and 1930s, and the 1950s and 1960s. For most of the last 200 years, Australians’ approach to their national security has generally been based on the tension between two fundamental concepts, each of which has a strong hold on the public mind. One asserts that Australia is a large but sparsely populated continent, set in an alien and potentially hostile environment, far distant from the sources of its culture and values, and incapable of defending itself without close relationships with the countries that its longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, famously called “our great and powerful friends”, meaning Britain and more recently the United States. The other perspective asserts that to rely on these powerful but distant allies is highly problematic; that they may lack the desire and/or the capacity to help Australia in its hour of need; that close association with these powerful but distant allies leads to Australian involvement in “other people’s wars”; and that Australia must therefore make its own way in the Asia Pacific region, asserting its independence and assuring its security by making its own friends and alliances in the region. The tug between these two views has often been portrayed as the struggle between imperial alliance and national independence , or between our history and our geography. It might better be seen as the debate between a global and a regional perspective. Participants in the never-ending debate between these two positions draw their evidence from conflicts ranging from Sudan in the 1880s to Afghanistan today, but they most frequently turn to the early years of the Second World War. That is why Australian books, movies, documentaries and [3.145.164.106] Project MUSE...

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