‘Well, there it is,’ said Curtin sympathetically. ‘Politics is a funny game.’
Late that afternoon the budget was voted down and Parliament adjourned. Fadden went to Lord Gowrie to resign, and soon after Curtin arrived by summons. ‘You’ll be prime minister against your will,’ one of his critics inside the party had said. But there was no reluctance in the telegram Curtin had already sent to his wife Elsie on 3 October, the day before her birthday: ‘This is your birthday gift. Coles and Wilson are providing it, they have announced their intention of voting for our amendment and the Government will be defeated. Love, John.’
Elsie Curtin chose not to live with him at the Lodge. It was a decision arrived at mutually, since Elsie had their daughter, also Elsie, and her own mother to look after in Cottesloe. At that time the Curtins’ son John was stationed at a nearby RAAF camp. The pattern was that Elsie senior would come to Canberra twice a year and stay at the Lodge for two or so months. Many assume she was a political nullity, but in fact she was strongly versed in Labor doctrine, and yet afflicted by acute shyness and a sense of unfitness for the bigger world. ‘It was strange for me to have such a big place to run,’ she unaffectedly later said, ‘and well-meaning people confused me by telling me what I should wear.’ Pattie Menzies, Robert’s wife, daughter of a federal senator, had made a much more polished job of living at the Lodge, and in British society.
The press, including the Melbourne Age, applauded Curtin’s accession, saying that Labor had shown it would be able to prosecute the war vigorously. At this crucial time, Curtin appointed Frank Forde as Minister for Defence and deputy leader. Forde, like Curtin, was the son of Irish immigrants, Forde’s father having been a railway ganger at Mitchell in Queensland. Forde himself was a champion of the sugar and cotton industries and of protective tariffs, and had served in Scullin’s government as Minister for Trade and Customs. The vigorously self-educated former engine driver, Ben Chifley from Bathurst became Treasurer. And Herbert Vere Evatt, as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, could now set out to address the crisis he knew was calling to him and to Australia.
On taking office, Curtin sent a telegram to Churchill assuring him that Labor would ‘co-operate fully’ in bringing victory to the Empire and its Allies. Despite this, he insisted that the remainder of the 9th Division be relieved from the besieged town of Tobruk, for fear they would be overrun. Churchill complied reluctantly.
Domestically, Curtin introduced a production executive under the control of John Dedman, a former Indian Army officer and Victorian dairy farmer who was Minister for War Organisation of Industry. There had been a similar organisation under Menzies’ government, but it was now, as Curtin said, ‘a real department’. Dedman was Scots-born and a survivor of Gallipoli, Egypt and France. His Presbyterian energy worked well with Curtin’s compulsive Irish vision of Australia as a place which, if obliterated, would deprive the earth of its last best chance. In this way he echoed Deakin’s convictions about Australia’s social uniqueness.
The idea that Curtin transformed the focus of Australia immediately from Europe to the Pacific is one that was stated and applauded in many families, including my own. But in fact during the eight weeks Curtin was given before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Malaya and Hong Kong, many commitments to the Northern European theatre remained as they had been before. There was one great difference, though—while Menzies cold-shouldered the Americans for fear that British interests in the Pacific would be diminished, Curtin gave permission for American aircraft to land in Australia as long as the war lasted—this permission having been granted seven weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack. He also agreed that the United States could establish an air route between Hawaii and the Philippines, using bases in Australia and New Guinea, and though Britain was informed of these new arrangements, it was not consulted on them. Curtin still part-believed, however, the unlikely British promise that it would abandon the Mediterranean to hold Singapore. He did not yet fully see it as Churchill’s desperate and even deceitful means of keeping the Australian divisions in the Middle East.
Blamey came back home to speak to Curtin in October 1941, but the general’s military focus was, understandably enough, on the Middle East, and indeed he wanted the 8th Division, then in part in Singapore, to be sent to the Middle East. But the request was unrealistic. By now it seemed that war with Japan was inevitable—all intelligence indicated it. Japan’s first ambassador to Australia, Tatsuo Kawai, had arrived early in the year; though he believed in Japanese expansion north of the equator, Kawai liked Curtin, and tried to organise a deal by which in return for iron ore, Australia’s safety would be guaranteed. Kawai told his government that, ‘Deeply thinking about the Japanese–Australian relations, [Curtin] is open-minded enough to listen without prejudice to arguments in favour of friendship between the two countries. He is a man of considerable calibre.’ Kawai had visited Perth and even dined at the Curtins’ home. Visiting the Lodge, he had given Elsie a signed copy of his 1938 book, The Goal of Japanese Expansion. Now, at the end of October 1941, he told Prime Minister Curtin in a private meeting that war was nearly unavoidable.
Curtin did not yet, despite the rumours of war, initiate plans to withdraw the Australians from North Africa and bring them home. He was comforted to know that a great force of American B17 heavy bombers was being assembled in the Philippines (though most of them would be destroyed on the ground in Japanese bombing attacks during the second day of the Pacific War). Closer to home, in mid November 1941 the light cruiser Sydney had sighted the German ship Kormoran, a raider designed for sinking merchant shipping, south of Carnarvon off the coast of Western Australia, and had set out to chase her. The Kormoran hoisted signals which were deliberately obscured from the Sydney by Kormoran’s smoke stack, and pretended to be a Dutch freighter, all with the purpose to lure the Sydney within range of its gun. Sydney, travelling abeam of the raider, had a well-trained crew and had sunk the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni off Cape Spada in Crete the year before. Now it asked Kormoran to show its secret Allied sign; since the German commander, Theodor Detmers, could not do so, he had no choice but to hoist the German flag, uncover his guns, open fire and send off torpedoes. Sydney’s answer to this fire was at first inaccurate, but then a shell hit the Kormoran in the funnel and destroyed the engine room and electrical installations. One of the raider’s torpedoes nonetheless hit the Sydney by her forward turrets. Within five minutes both ships were doomed. Sydney fired four torpedoes, which all missed, and as she struggled away, was further hit by Kormoran’s guns. Detmers ordered the Kormoran abandoned, because the mines lying in its hold could explode. The crew abandoned ship after setting charges.
The Germans saw the glare of the receding Sydney, and were the last to see anything of her, for of her crew of 645, none survived. Receiving this news, Curtin said, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to make the announcement . . . so I went to Government House and talked to the Governor-General.’ Sydney’s departure from the port it was named for had been delayed by industrial trouble, and Curtin felt that had he moved against the strikers, it could have left port on time and thus avoided Kormoran.
CHAPTER 5
Japan ascendant
The unstoppable force
THE PROPHET OF JAPAN–AUSTRALIA: RUSSO
Peter Russo, an Australian, spent the years 1931–41 in Japan, first as a student and later as an academic and consultant. He was a delegate and later Australian advisor to Japan’s main organisation for international cultural relations, and advisor to the leader of the Japanese goodwill mission to Australia and New Zealand in 1935. Through his writing for the Melbourne Argus and his pro-Japanese ABC broadcasts, questions over Russo’s loyalty arose in the late 1930s when he was seen as a voice for Japanese expansion in the Pacific. He was certainly not apologetic about it. He chastised his fellow Australians, writing off all their concerns to racism and susceptibility to propaganda.
Russo had been born in Ballarat in 1908 to
an Italian father and Italian–Spanish mother, and it was a Melbourne University scholarship that first sent him to Japan in 1931. He moved into a students’ hostel in Tokyo, ate only Japanese food, adopted Japanese clothing and attended Shinto ceremonies. This did not endear him to Tokyo’s narrow-minded European community, who were there chiefly for trade opportunities. He commenced his studies at the Imperial University of Tokyo, but interrupted them in 1932 to take up an appointment as advisor to the Japanese trade mission to Europe.
During the eighteen months that the mission was travelling, Russo attended language and literature courses at universities in Rome and Paris. He returned to Japan in 1933, was offered a lectureship in modern languages at the Tokyo College of Commerce and took up the position in April 1934.
In early 1935, Russo was asked to be one of two delegates to give a series of lectures and exhibit a selection of Japanese art and crafts in the West. Russo was to lecture in Australia. The tour was arranged by the cultural organisation KBS, whose president was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Prime Minister of Japan in 1937 and for some months in 1940. Konoe made sincere attempts to curb the military leadership. He had been at the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations in 1919 (we do not know if he discussed Billy Hughes’ behaviour in Paris, his vocal and successful opposition to including a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles, but it would have been very likely he did).
Russo was now writing his doctoral thesis and lecturing, but he was also asked to accompany Japanese diplomat Katsuji Debuchi, former Japanese Foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, as personal advisor on a goodwill tour of Australia and New Zealand. Japan was beginning to think of Australia as a friendly commercial neighbour due to the charming frankness and informality of Chief Justice of the High Court Sir John Latham’s visit to Japan the year before. Russo agreed to go, though he doubted how much good the delegation could do.
From the time of his arrival in Australia on the Atsuta Maru on 11 July 1936, Russo assured Australian journalists that it was appropriate for all thinking Australians to study Japanese history and civilisation. His lecture at the University of Melbourne on 9 August, before a large crowd, was entitled ‘The Mind of Japan’. His argument was that due to a lack of understanding of Japanese culture, the West misunderstood Japanese ambition and saw all that Japan did as threatening. Russo’s speeches, like his broadcasts, reproached Australians for not understanding this. Then Russo escorted Debuchi throughout his goodwill tour, beginning in Canberra. ‘We have been charmed with Mr Debuchi’s delightful and attractive personality,’ Prime Minister Lyons wrote to Japan’s Foreign minister.
Shortly after his return to Japan, Russo was offered regular duty with Konoe’s KBS. He arranged cultural exchanges and persuaded the Victorian Education Department to introduce a high-school Japanese-language program. He organised for the Melbourne University debating team to visit Japan. Russo’s friend Alexander Melbourne, an historian from the University of Queensland, asked the KBS to select a Japanese lecturer for the university. The post was subsequently filled by a scholar named Ryunosuke Seita.
In late 1937, Russo began to write regularly for the Melbourne Herald on Japanese matters, as well as sending a monthly Far Eastern newsletter to the ABC that was broadcast on radio and reproduced in ABC Weekly. He was concerned that the cultural relationship between the two countries was dwindling. By 1940 Russo admitted it was ‘one-way traffic’, with the Australians neglecting or snubbing Japan. The Japanese were sending cultural material to Australia but Australia did not respond. He himself donated books on Australia, paid for out of his own pocket, to Tokyo University.
It is not hard to see, even apart from Japanese expansion into China, why Russo’s hopes were withering. In May 1936, the Australians announced a policy of buying British rather than cheaper Japanese textiles. In November 1936, Japan and Germany concluded an anti-Comintern (Communist International) pact that Italy also later joined. In 1937, the Japanese began a further campaign against China, and it became clear that the militarists were in control in Japan. In May 1938, the popular travel writer Frank Clune reported, rightly or wrongly, that maps of the Japanese empire he had seen on sale in Japan included the whole of Australia and New Zealand. In the same year, a Japanese artist who visited Australia was astonished at the prevalence of anti-Japanese sentiment. In the imitation battles of Australian children, he noticed, the envisioned enemy was Japan. The artist is not named but his sentiments were published in the Sydney Morning Herald of 18 July 1938. After the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, fear that Japan would join her pact partners, Germany and Italy, in the intensified Axis Pact was confirmed when Japan did exactly that in September 1940.
At the end of May 1940, Russo was awarded the Order of the Knight of the Crown of Italy for the promotion of Italian cultural relationships with Japan and Australia. He was embarrassed by the timing of the decoration, since Italy was soon to become an enemy power. The award had been prompted, he told his family, by the fact that he was a lecturer in Italian at Tokyo University and was responsible for the supervision of local Italian publications. He had been, he said, a ‘general rouse-about’ for Italian economic missions that had visited Japan in recent years.
By mid-1940, Russo’s second home leave came up. The KBS asked him to do all he could to smooth perceptions while in Australia. He would be bringing gifts and messages from Japanese leaders. The ABC had agreed to broadcast some of these messages, including one from his friend Prince Konoe, then Japanese Prime Minister: ‘Washed by the waters of the Pacific, neighbours in this fear of the future, are Australia and Japan, two vital dynamic countries whose cultural cooperation can do much to foster the causes of universal enlightenment through the mediums of art and science.’
Russo declared he himself wanted to take back with him to Japan ‘some tangible expression of Japan–Australia ties as distinct from the political vagaries that so often afflict international relationships’. By now his defence of Japanese policies had grown passionate. It was difficult to interpret Japan’s economic or political plans at present, he admitted, because, given the hostility of others, she was forced to follow a policy of expedience. The Japanese leadership sincerely desired cordial relationships with Australia but they felt that Australia might have cooperated more fully by appointing a representative in Japan. A mere trade commissioner to Japan was not enough, Russo pointed out. Again he accused Australians of lack of interest in Asian peoples and cultures. ‘It seems as if any man who wants to go to the East to study is regarded as a bit of a freak,’ he argued, with some merit. There was no attempt in the academies to acquaint students with Japan’s history and culture, he chided, and the result was a primitive understanding of world politics. European countries and their policies were not seen as strange and mysterious but Japan’s always were. Outsiders could not understand that the Emperor was placed as the ‘supreme personage to whose policies absolute unquestionable obedience was given no matter how illogical those policies might appear to others’.
On 18 August 1940, Prime Minister Menzies announced the appointment of Sir John Latham, while still chief justice, as the first Australian Minister to Japan. Russo had undoubtedly helped bring this about. Russo’s expertise led to his being asked by the acting Australian trade commissioner in Tokyo, Albert Hard, if he would supply the captions and dub in a newsreel message by Latham to the Japanese people. This was arranged through the Department of Information.
Russo’s activities in Australia were constantly monitored and, where the authorities considered necessary, censored. A military intelligence report of 5 August concluded that he was in Australia as a mouthpiece of the Japanese Foreign Office and that his mission was to suggest in the course of his speeches and broadcasts that Australia’s policy in the Far East should differ from that of Great Britain, and to suggest that in resisting trade pressure from Britain the Australian government would help to maintain trade and peace with Japan. Russo had also suggested that Australia had
no interest in the Sino–Japanese conflict and that they should make this clear to Japan. He similarly argued that Australia had no interest in any argument between Britain and Japan over Hong Kong and Shanghai. He tried loosening the ties between Australia and Britain by emphasising Australia’s independent interests in the Pacific region. Russo, said military intelligence, was ‘under the cloak of patriotism for Australia’ spreading views that were an attempt to sever Australia from the British Empire’s policy in the Pacific . Russo was not on favourable terms with the British in Tokyo, because he had antipathy to their old-school-tie attitudes. But he was hurt by Australian intelligence’s inquiries about him in Tokyo, to which Japanese friends alerted him.
His sincerity made an impression on two criminal investigation branch officers who, after conversing with Russo for several hours, produced a different assessment. He seemed to these men to be loyal to Australia, and potentially useful. But his ideas were under attack in the media, and to many correspondents to newspapers the idea of fraternising with a government (and a race) responsible for the occupation of Korea and Manchuria and now the attempted seizure of China was ‘just plainly repulsive’. The rape of Nanking had also produced abhorrence in Australians. Russo and the honorary consul for Japan in Melbourne, David York Syme, a Melbourne businessman with interests in trade with Japan, received threatening letters, one of which gave Russo twenty-four hours to live. A letter writer from Ballarat to the prime minister related rumours that Russo was a Japanese–Italian agent and that one of his sisters was openly a Nazi sympathiser.
Russo was caught between stools. He knew that if he returned to Japan his life would be more constricted and more dangerous. Though his university appointment gave him some protection, his writing for Australian newspapers and radio placed him at risk. His Tokyo rooms had been searched by Japan’s military police. On 2 October, still in Australia, he wrote to Akiyama, Japanese consul in Sydney, seeking advice on whether to extend his stay in Australia or to return to Japan. Akiyama advised him to return to Japan ‘for the purpose of acquainting yourself with the latest trends of thought there and ascertaining the actual conditions at first hand’; Russo would have more authority by speaking from Japan about conditions. So he went back. Years later he stated that the casualness and hopeful attitudes of many foreigners in Tokyo before the war broke out in the Pacific was wishful thinking, based on their comfortable life in Japan. He acknowledged that they would have a problem ‘to re-groove ourselves back home’.