America’s sleight of hand caused Evatt to issue a long press statement, in which he claimed: ‘If this kind of thing goes on in San Francisco, the World Organization will inevitably be subverted.’ He was aware of how, after all Woodrow Wilson’s promotion in 1919 of a League of Nations, the Americans had decided in the end not to join it. ‘Pan Americanism is valuable, but unless the authority of the Central Security Council is maintained, it may develop into a form of [American continental] isolationism which is calculated to destroy the World Organization at birth.’
But the veto issue also recurred. There must be no member in the Security Council, big or small, Evatt came to argue, who was not willing to act in the interest of world security. The sole purpose of any veto, he argued, must be to ensure that the great powers would act with unanimity to quell disturbances. It was there to promote security, he argued, but not to make it’s application impossible. ‘We don’t mind a veto on a shooting match, because the big powers have to carry the burden of shooting. What we object to is a veto on a talking match’—that is, the exclusion of lesser voices from the discourse of the great powers.
A quarrel that arose out of France’s attempt to take over Syria again in the face of Syrian independence brought delegates face to face with the fact that under the previously agreed Yalta peace veto formula the new peace machinery could neither investigate the quarrel between France (one of the Big Five) and the Arabs, prevent French shooting Arabs, nor tell the French to stop doing so unless the French themselves wanted to be prevented or scolded. At the Yalta Conference, held in Crimea in February 1945, the United States, Britain and Russia had agreed to admit France as a permanent member of the Security Council, and that any of the permanent members would have veto power over any decision of the Security Council. At Yalta, where the Soviet Union had agreed to join the fight against Japan, it seemed cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union would continue into the age of peace, and the Allies agreed that in reward for the Soviet Union’s efforts, the Eastern European nations it had liberated would be considered ‘friendly to’ it. (The manner in which ‘friendly to’ was transmuted into ‘dominated by’ was well known.) What Evatt and other representatives of smaller nations wanted to change about Yalta was not that proposition—after all, there was no guarantee when the war against Japan would end. It was the veto rule they wanted to change. Amongst the protests of small nations against the veto, none were louder than those of Evatt. Stettinius, Molotov and Halifax might have the numbers, but Evatt had the public sympathy. Stettinius, US Secretary of State, made a national broadcast in which he said that the criticism was not justified but Evatt’s position was logical. It would be appalling if, although ten of the eleven members of the Council might anxiously desire to attempt conciliation of a conflict, one single power, by exercising its veto against those very peace-making desires, could permit ‘a dispute between two other states . . . [to] drag on indefinitely’.
There was a ditty—written, it is believed, by Evatt himself—on the subject of Britain, the United States and Soviet Union and their desire not to give way on veto powers:
We must not alter Yalta,
It would not please the Russ.
We must not alter Yalta,
Joe would make a fuss.
What Yalta means is doubtful,
But Joe must have his way.
His view must be accepted
Or he’ll take his bat away.
And when it came to fighting the Japanese, his bat was potentially very potent indeed. The Soviet Union had at least yielded to Evatt’s argument that the veto should not apply to the banning of free discussion of international quarrels. So the discussion of a situation could proceed despite the veto. But though Evatt attempted to have an interview with the Big Five representatives at the Fairmont Hotel, he could not shake them. One wonders if he was naïve in taking the trouble. The instances of major powers giving up power voluntarily are not plentiful. He spent all of a June Sunday contacting other delegations in an effort to win their support for a new strategy. But the other delegations had already come to terms with the veto—some were realistic, some were cautious. Was even one of the non-Russian Soviet republics likely to vote against Russia; would a South American nation dependent on US investment or trade choose to fight its great patron? There was the one final debate on Monday without any result and then the diplomats and ministers began packing up.
What did Evatt achieve at San Francisco? As the Christian Science Monitor reported, Australia submitted thirty-eight amendments but Evatt’s favourite was probably the enshrining of the right to work, that is, of full employment. Failing in persuading others, he was reduced however to asking the United Nations General Assembly, ‘Will anyone in favour of unemployment stand up?’ To him, his most satisfactory achievement was the chapters on trusteeships which gave non-self-governing countries protection against abuses and imposed on the governing powers an obligation to report regularly on the economic, social and educational development of the subject peoples.
Twenty of the amendments, some of them procedural and concerning the process of Security Council and General Assembly debates, were wholly or partly incorporated in the new United Nations Charter. To achieve this, Evatt fought and kicked against and argued with everyone who stood in his way, including Stettinius, Gromyko, Halifax, and Wellington Koo, the representative of Nationalist China, which had only four more years of existence left on the Chinese mainland before the Communist Revolution. But here again, the shadow of White Australia made the Australian delegation vulnerable. Speaking to Koo on immigration, Evatt used the same argument against explicit racial equality clauses Billy Hughes had on racial matters: ‘You have always insisted on the right to determine the composition of your own people. Australia wants that right now. What you are attempting to do now, Japan attempted after the last war and was prevented by Australia. Had we opened New Guinea and Australia to Japanese immigration, then the Pacific War by now might have ended disastrously and we might have had another shambles like that experienced in Malaya.’
Even so, as a reward for his efforts, Australia was made a non-permanent member of the Security Council. Evatt was made head of the International Atomic Commission, and at the second session he chaired the committee on the future of Palestine. He was thus instrumental in creating settlements that allowed for the emergence of Israel, but Israel did not like the carving up of Jerusalem into sectors, which was Evatt’s idea to honour the diverse sacredness of the city. He would be in time (1948) president of the Security Council and in that role would persuade Britain to let Ireland leave the Commonwealth without any penalty or vengefulness operating. (Britain already felt rancour towards Ireland for its neutrality in the war, even if tens of thousands of citizens of the Irish Free State had served in the British forces.)
But to return to the framing of the United Nations Charter, and its acceptance in June 1945, the New York Times said on 27 June: ‘When Dr Evatt came here he was a virtually unknown second-string delegate, with the background of a professor and Labor politician. He leaves, recognized as the most brilliant and effective voice of the Small Powers, a leading statesman for the world’s conscience, the man who was not afraid to force liberalization of the League charter, and who had sense enough not to press his threat so far as to break up the conference.’ The British, led by the cynical Lord Halifax, considered Evatt’s desperate earnestness and his passion that in the United Nations Australia should operate on its own, not Commonwealth, terms, ‘bad form’. Just the same, in the last session of the Steering Committee of the United Nations Charter, a special resolution was moved thanking Dr Evatt. It was passed by acclamation and with applause.
Lord Cherwell, a sinister influence on Churchill in many areas, including that of the Bengal famine of 1943–44, meanwhile poured scorn on the idea of the United Nations and on Evatt’s ‘postures’. In Canberra, the Country Party’s Black Jack McEwen similarly wrote off Evatt’s efforts in San Francisco
as showmanship. McEwen had been in San Francisco too, and had been appalled by what he claimed was Evatt’s misuse of staff in working them relentlessly and making them attend meetings late at night. McEwen had attended some early sessions of the San Francisco conference but soon left, uncertain of the benefit of the United Nations to Australian farmers.
Evatt attracted the rage of the left because of his attacks on the Soviet Union, and the contempt of the right for his supposed posturing as a world figure. Later Foreign minister Paul Hasluck, who as a public servant had worked with Evatt in San Francisco, would come to believe that there was no chance of unanimity of purpose amongst the great powers, but that had not been so apparent a few months after Yalta, when Evatt went to the conference.
Evatt had at least established, in his role of champion of small nations, the idea that great and small powers might face international judgement for their crimes against the human race.
AFTER THE SKY FELL IN: AUSTRALIA AND THE BOMB
Professor Mark Oliphant, an Australian-born physicist based in England, in 1941 advised the Australian Minister in Washington, Richard Casey, about British work on uranium, and the potential of nuclear energy for military use. But the imminence of nuclear destruction did not become evident until May 1944, when the British government, acting on advice from Oliphant, asked the Australian government to contribute uranium for military purposes. Uranium had been mined since 1906 at Radium Hill and since 1910 at Mount Painter, both in South Australia.
Now the Australians hoped that assistance in supplying uranium might be exchanged for access to information about atomic research. But the amounts at Mount Painter were not adequate for Britain’s needs. In fact, access to atomic information was only one of several areas of Allied decision-making in the early stages of the war from which Australia was excluded. Australia nonetheless shared with the American population a determination to punish Japan, and to ensure that a capacity to wage war was permanently destroyed.
At Potsdam on 26 July 1945, the leaders of the three great powers, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, issued an ultimatum to Japan, calling on it to surrender or suffer ‘utter destruction of the Japanese homeland’, but also promising an ultimate place for a renewed and democratic Japan amongst the nations of the world. On 28 July, Japan rejected the ultimatum, and the next day Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, Evatt, launched the first of several verbal attacks on the Allies’ decision-making process. Some peace terms outlined in the ultimatum did not reflect Australia’s wishes, as they appeared to be more lenient than those imposed on Germany, despite what Evatt described as the ‘outrageous cruelties and barbarities systematically practised’ by the Japanese authorities. He did not know what horror was about to be unleashed.
On 6 August, the first atomic bomb was dropped, on Hiroshima. On 8 August, the Soviet Union at last honoured Yalta by declaring war on Japan, and on 9 August a second bomb was dropped, this time at Nagasaki. The following day, Japan announced that she would accept the Potsdam ultimatum on the understanding that the prerogatives of the Emperor were preserved. In response to a request for its views, the Australian government stressed that the Emperor should assume full responsibility for Japan’s aggression and war crimes. By the time these views were communicated by the Australian mission in Washington, however, the United States government had already decided on the terms of surrender. The Japanese Emperor was to be subject to the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, Douglas MacArthur.
On 14 August, the Japanese accepted the terms, and the next day the Emperor broadcast to the Japanese people the decision to surrender. Evatt again deplored the tendency of the great powers to ‘relegate Australia to a subordinate status, allowed no consultation at all, only ratification after the fact’. For the next two years, Evatt would continue to assert his view that the Emperor should be tried as a war criminal, despite the argument that the Emperor’s execution would lead to instability within Japan itself and within the Asian region.
While Evatt was anxious that the United Nations should take up responsibility for the control of the new and devastating bombs, he seemed to have very little doubt as to whether they should have been dropped on Japan. Chifley made the point that Evatt’s position was endorsed by the Australian government, influenced as all Australia was by the first newsreel and press images of the liberation of the Asian POW camps, the skeletal young soldiers and civilians who had endured Japanese imprisonment. None of this was calculated to evoke compassion in Australian hearts for the Japanese nation.
For a brief and ecstatic season, with servicemen and civilians celebrating the end of conflict in squares and streets all over Australia, it was hard to see that the phenomenon that had struck the Japanese would soon enough—and perhaps forever after—come to dominate the imaginations and concerns of all humans. On 9 August, three prominent members of the Methodist Church in New South Wales had issued a statement warning that if the United Nations persisted in using the atomic bomb, they would ‘inflict a devastating blow on their claim to the moral leadership of the world’. But at first hardly anyone disapproved of the dropping of the Hiroshima and then the Nagasaki bomb. News of the bombing of Nagasaki tended to take second place in the press behind the Soviet Union’s declaration of war and new invasion of Manchuria. And far more letters to the editor supported the use of the atom bomb than opposed it. An Australian Gallup poll taken in September 1945 showed that 83 per cent of Australians thought the use of the bomb against Japan was justified. As for servicemen, there was solid support for the bomb from them. ‘Few serving Australian sailors, soldiers or airmen could shut their minds entirely to the possibility of death on some Japanese beach.’
For the hibakusha themselves (the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings), their experience seemed to be completely outside the limits of others’ understanding and imagining. It took mere hours before others came to agree with them. A number of journals, including the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, declared the bomb ‘as difficult for the imagination to envisage as it is for the unscientific mind to comprehend’. Argus correspondent and novelist-in-waiting George Johnston visited Hiroshima a month after the bombing and stated that the city bore no resemblance to other war-destroyed areas. The Sydney Morning Herald declared in an editorial that ‘the impulse to rejoice over the prospective shortening of the Pacific War is tempered at once by consciousness of what this epochal and affrighting discovery must mean to the future of mankind’.
The issue of radioactivity was not taken up very much at the time. Wilfred Burchett, an Australian who had helped smuggle Jews out of Europe and to Australia, was the first Western media representative to enter Hiroshima—without permission—after the bombing. At Hiroshima Hospital, Burchett saw people dying from what he later realised was radiation sickness. Doctors were at a loss as to how to treat them. Believing at first that the victims were suffering from general debility, they had given them vitamin injections, with horrific results. The flesh around the puncture marks rotted and the patients died. Burchett published in the London Daily Express on 6 September an article headed, ‘The Atomic Plague: I write this as a warning to the world.’
American authorities reacted swiftly and claimed that the bomb had exploded high enough over Hiroshima to avoid the risk of residual radiation. Burchett was taken away to undergo medical tests, only to discover on leaving the hospital that his camera and its pictures of Hiroshima had been stolen and his press accreditation withdrawn. In the Cold War, he would bear the stigma of being pro-Communist, and at least some of the character assassination he suffered was based on his condemnation of the bomb.
At the end of the war Australians were still only beginning to hear of atrocities against prisoners and assess the survival rate amongst them. For example, the matron-in-chief of the Australian Army Nursing Service, Colonel Annie Sage, veteran of nursing in the Middle East, flew to Sumatra in September 1945 to meet surviving nurses. She was appalled to find that of the sixty-five nurs
es who had escaped Singapore on the Vyner Brooke, only twenty-four had come through: eight died in captivity, twelve in the sinking of the ship, and twenty-one in the Banka Island massacre described elsewhere. ‘Where are the rest of you?’, asked Annie Sage plaintively. One of these survivors, Pat Gunther, had been taught drawing by a fellow prisoner, a Dutch nun, and had sketched details of the punitive camp in Palembang in which she spent nearly three years. Nor was survival rate the only issue. When Betty Jeffery, captured in Singapore, was literated from Muntok Island, she weighed only thirty kilos and suffered from turberculosis.
What was true of women prisoners was reflected in the condition of liberated male prisoners and in their camp survival rate as well.
The provisional United Nations had set up a War Crimes Commission in August 1943, even while the organisation itself was a mere concept. Even earlier, in 1942, the Australians had founded a Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internees to collect evidence on atrocities. A section of the directorate was established specifically to bring Japanese responsible for war crimes to justice. Those Australian POWs repatriated from the European theatre would ultimately give evidence of German atrocities, evidence the Australian directorate sent on to the UN War Crimes Commission. Interestingly, no such commission, Australian or international, had been founded to deal with World War I atrocities.
Sir William Webb, a much-respected and genuinely august Queenslander, another of those scholarship boys who became a Supreme Court of Queensland judge, was appointed to begin investigation in June 1944 as War Crimes Commissioner, and General MacArthur agreed to make US army witnesses available to the Australians. Webb began his work in Brisbane, where he examined information made available from army sources. Then, in Newcastle, Townsville, Rockhampton and New Guinea, he began to interview survivors and escapees, and thus witnesses of crimes. Early in 1945, Webb accepted responsibility for liaising with Australian and other prisoners who were liberated by the advancing Allied armies. In April 1945, he was able to begin the questioning of civilians freed from the Philippines. A Japanese prisoner of war named Kunio Yunomi, held in the POW camp at Murchison in Victoria, was arrested in connection with the murder of an Australian soldier and two natives in New Guinea. Moved ultimately to Rabaul, the region in which his crime had been committed, he was tried after the war by an Australian military court and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Yunomi’s was not the first post-war trial, however.