John Curtin: honourable man but hardly a great prime minister

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

I have some reason to think kindly of John Curtin and his family.

Before World War II he praised the work my father, Sir Hal Colebatch, was doing in London as West Australian agent-general despite their political differences. They were allies in the WA “gold bonus” campaign. During the war my father in his newspaper, The Northam Advertiser, called for Curtin to be given every support as prime minister, and on Curtin’s death wrote that he had sacrificed his life for his country.

When my father died, Curtin’s widow wrote my mother a very kind letter, which I still possess.

It therefore gives me no pleasure to argue that, contrary to David Crowe’s article (Commentary, 29/9), Curtin, undoubtedly a very good and decent human being, and deserving of our historic gratitude for leading the Labor Party out of outright pacifism, was not “one of Australia’s greatest prime ministers”. Facts are facts.

Arthur Fadden was not the only conservative politician to treat Curtin gently. Robert Menzies also praised Curtin, treated him with more friendliness than did some of Curtin’s own partyroom, and said in a letter to his son that it would be a tragedy if Curtin died. They were on first-name terms and it is pleasant to record that this politeness and goodwill was reciprocated by Curtin (“I wish you fair winds”).

Curtin came to power almost exactly as the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war. Its progress could then be predicted, and indeed was foreseen by the Japanese naval supremo, Isoroku Yamamoto: Japan would run wild for some months, winning victory after victory. But once the US rose to its full strength, Japan would be crushed.

Curtin’s job was much easier than that of his predecessor, Menzies, who was prime minister in the desperate days when Germany was winning the war. Further, thanks to Menzies’ herculean efforts in building up a defence infrastructure from almost nothing, an invasion of Australia would have been very difficult and costly, and the Japanese never attempted it.

Curtin simply had to hold the line until America geared up. But the Curtin government committed one bungle after another.

There was the disaster of Rabaul, where there was an Australian garrison of about 1500 men — enough to die but not enough to hold the island. The government should have evacuated them to fight another day but did nothing.

The Japanese attacked Rabaul with a huge fleet and carrier-borne aircraft. The Australian air defence consisted of 10 Wirraways — sluggish training aircraft with just two guns each. In an act of doomed heroism they took off to meet the swarming Japanese Zeros and were shot out of the sky. Almost none of the Rabaul garrison survived.

Curtin decided this would be a good time to take a holiday and trundled back across the Nullarbor to Perth aboard a slow steam train, out of touch with his cabinet and the war. The crisis — perhaps Australia’s worst — may have been simply too much for him.

Strikes in vital industries — coalmining, munitions plants, railway workshops and on the waterfront — were endemic throughout the war, with about six million working days directly lost (the days lost through flow-on stoppages were multiples of that).

Menzies, when leading a non-Labor government, probably feared to take strong action against the strikers for fear of provoking wider troubles. Curtin, as a Labor prime minister, was much better placed to do this but in fact did nothing beyond remonstrating with the strikers in a feeble and bewildered way, asking them if they knew there was a war on, although that was the main reason they went on strike, as I detailed in my book Australia’s Secret War.

Because of strikes, Milne Bay was defended against a Japanese landing without heavy guns or anti-aircraft guns. Food, radios and vehicles were pilfered, aircraft and aircraft engines were deliberately wrecked on the wharves, and towards the end troops in New Guinea, as well as being short of ammunition, were on starvation rations because of strikes.

Coal strikes were probably even more damaging, and shipbuilding and repairs — even the building of life rafts — were also the subject of strikes and go-slows. Curtin never took on even the most destructive and frankly treacherous strikers, merely calling on some to return to work “in Australia’s name”.

Curtin’s labour and national service minister, the traitorous Eddie Ward, called his prime minister a liar in parliament, openly sided with many of the strikers and coined the name “four-bob-a-day murderers” for Australian servicemen. Curtin could not, or would not, shift him to a portfolio where he might do less harm.

It seems likely the strain imposed on Curtin by the strikes and by his cabinet, including Ward, contributed to his death related to high blood pressure aged just 60. Three of his closest political associates — his successor, Ben Chifley, WA’s former Labor premier Philip Collier and Curtin’s attache and biographer Lloyd Ross, said this more or less at the time.

Late in the war the Curtin government wasted hundreds of lives in expensive and useless campaigns against bypassed and helpless Japanese island garrisons. The pointlessness of these was so patent that some servicemen were on the verge of mutiny, and the matter was raised trenchantly by Menzies in parliament.

Curtin’s political ideas seem to have been innocent but desperately naive: he claimed initially that the objective of Australia in the war was to create a unified, clear-thinking union movement.

Was that all he thought the war was about? And when the war and the Holocaust were well under way, he stated that the ALP had absolutely no objection to the Germany practising Nazism in Germany. Imagine if Menzies had said that. It would be taken as evidence that he was a Nazi sympathiser and the right-of-centre parties would never have heard the end of it.

Unquestionably a good and honourable man, but …

Hal GP Colebatch is the author of Australia’s Secret War: How Unions Sabotaged our Troops in World War II, which shared the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History.