Book Review - The Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal
The Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal,
Written by: Augustine Meaher IV,
Melbourne, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010,
ISBN 9781921509957, 243 pp, RRP AU$39.95
Reviewed by: John Connor
Sometimes it takes an outsider to provide a clear-eyed interpretation of a controversial event in a nation’s history. In this book, Augustine Meaher IV—who, as his name suggests, is a larger-than-life military historian from Mobile, Alabama in America’s Deep South—provides a compelling analysis of why Australia was so unprepared to defend itself at the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. Meaher skewers the myth that the British betrayed Australia at the fall of Singapore; instead he places the blame on a comprehensive failure by the combined Australian political, military and industrial leadership to prepare adequately in the 1930s for a war with Japan.
According to Meaher, this failure came in two parts. The first was that Australians mistakenly saw the Singapore Strategy (the plan that, in the event of war in the Pacific, a British fleet would sail to a naval base at Singapore and do battle with the Imperial Japanese Navy) not as one component of a wider defence scheme, but as being an entire defence strategy in itself, ‘so absolving Australia of its responsibilities for local defence’.
The second was the inability of what Meaher describes as ‘the Australian elite’ to recognise the Japanese threat and take appropriate action. There was no consensus at the political level: the conservative United Australia Party government did attempt some rearmament policies, but were cautious in the face of a strongly isolationist and pacifist Labor Party opposition. When Billy Hughes, the former wartime leader, published Australia and War To-Day warning of war with Japan in 1935, Prime Minister Joe Lyons sacked him from Cabinet. The three service chiefs, facing funding cuts due to the Depression, fought each other to protect their budget and were unable to provide coherent strategic advice to their minister. As the Melbourne Herald commented in 1934, the only thing the Army and RAN agreed on was ‘their dislike of the air force’. Only 10 per cent of senior Australian industrialists had served in the military (despite the Great War having occurred two decades previously).With few exceptions, these businessmen took no interest in defence issues.
Meaher is rightly critical of Australian decision-making in this period. As he puts it, in the 1930s, Australia refused to grow up’. Its political leaders expected Britain to spend large amounts to complete the Singapore naval base, while refusing to make any financial contribution to the project themselves. Australian Army officers were sceptical of the Singapore Strategy and stressed the possibility of a Japanese invasion, but, as Meaher suggests, this was purely to protect their budget. If they truly believed an invasion was possible, they should have reorganised the Army (whose structure was based on the First World War AIF) to enable it to fight independently of British logistical support.
Meaher being the outsider also brings the disadvantage of lacking certain detailed and contextual knowledge. The weakest part of the book is the conclusion, when the author puts forward his argument of what Australia should have done in the interwar period to prepare for war. One of Meaher’s proposals is sound: the reintroduction of compulsory military training, though politically controversial, would have improved the Army’s readiness. The remainder, though, do not take sufficient account of the limitations Australia faced in this period. Meaher argues that the transport infrastructure in northern Australia should have been improved. The small size of the Australian population and economy meant, however, that large construction projects could not be built without foreign investment. During the Depression this source of funding was severely limited. In the same way, Meaher’s call for Australia to order Hurricane and Spitfires from the United Kingdom in the mid-1930s ignores Britain’s natural unwillingness in this period to divert aircraft production away from their own rearmament. These criticisms should not overshadow the real value of this book. By painting an unflattering portrait of Australian strategic thinking in this period, Meaher provides a clearer understanding of the past and expresses concern about current defence debates. He concludes: ‘If the attitude “She’ll be right” continues to dominate public and political thinking about defence, Australia runs the risk of being unprepared for any future war.’
