Great War’s shockwave resounded through the decades
Starvation, poverty and yet further fighting darkened the world despite the hopes of many
They called it the Great War and hoped it had changed the world. But the world was not so easily hammered into a new shape or infused with a new spirit.
On the day when the war officially ended — the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 — the news sped to Australia along the Pacific Ocean cable. Melbourne, then the nation’s capital, received the message that Monday evening at 7.20.
There were no radio stations and most homes lacked a telephone, but the news item — initially pasted on the outside walls of the newspaper offices spread like magic. That night the cheering crowds eventually filled the main streets of every big city. Many other families stayed at home. Having lost a son or father, brother or uncle, they wondered whether it was an occasion for celebrating.
Next day, in the federal parliament, “Willy” Watt as acting prime minister honoured the more than 60,000 men who had died and then turned to the nation’s women. He wished to pay “in feeble words, a special tribute to their courage, fortitude, and self-sacrifice”. There was widespread pride in how the nation had performed.
Most members of the huge Australian army were still overseas, in France and Belgium and Palestine. Ships had to be found to bring them home but the wartime loss of shipping even in neutral nations had been enormous. General Sir John Monash, moving from the quiet battlefields to London, skilfully organised the homewards voyage for 160,000 soldiers He himself did not step ashore in his home city of Melbourne until nearly 14 months after the war had ended. Perhaps nobody in the nation was more respected.
For a time it was called the war to end war. Watt assured his parliament that Australia “for many a generation will remain a safer and a happier place to live in”. In various nations, a host of people joined peace movements or thought of joining them. When the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) was formed in 1920, with Australia as an inaugural member, the faith was widespread that it would prevent or limit future wars.
Eventually a sobering fact became clear. The peace movement, dynamic in England but pitifully weak in Hitler’s Germany, unwittingly increased the likelihood of a second world war. In the crucial years of the 1930s, it inhibited Britain from rearming quickly at a time when Britain ought to have rearmed to confront a militant Nazi Germany.
Even the armistice of 1918 had no peaceful effects on many lands, especially during the following three years. There was fighting — virtually a civil war — in Ireland. International and civil wars broke out in Russia. Finland and Poland each fought the Russians, and the Bolsheviks and the White Russians fought each other. A small British army was shipped to the shores of the White Sea in northwest Russia. One of its soldiers was Arthur Sullivan, a shy bank clerk who, enlisting in South Australia in 1918, arrived in Europe too late to serve in the war. In the following year, fighting the Russians in a swamp near Archangel, he was awarded the Victoria Cross for an act of remarkable bravery while facing the enemy’s intense firepower.
In eastern Europe the Polish army fought the Czechs, and Romanians fought Hungarians. On the Baltic shores, little Latvia declared war on Germany. Greeks fought Turks in a deadly war in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, and in 1922 our prime minister Billy Hughes was invited — and was tempted — to send troops from Australia to intervene in that war. One year later, Italian forces, now under Mussolini’s command, bombarded and briefly occupied the Greek Island of Corfu.
In East Asia, violence erupted in the region where the Japanese and the Russian spheres of influence collided. In March 1920 came a Bolshevik campaign of terror and torture along the River Amur. In one small Russian city, more than 700 Japanese residents were killed, the women and children too. Even the Japanese consul and his family were tortured and killed. Japan responded by dispatching troops here and there.
To many citizens of the world, these were disturbing events. But they were thought to be minor compared with the ultimate fate of the defeated Germany. If Germany could be permanently tamed, perhaps Great Wars would be no more.
It was impossible to foresee in 1918 that the armistice would be followed, 21 years later, by an even longer and deadlier war. Initially the victors, especially France and Britain, were determined to keep Germany in a state of military weakness. They soon disarmed Germany, disbanded nearly all its army, sunk its submarines and confiscated its mightiest war ships.
They took away all its colonies, including German New Guinea, which Australia claimed. They redrew Germany’s home boundaries so that its area was smaller, its population and its resources fewer. Such a series of penalties, such punishments, surely would keep Germany from ever again becoming a military threat.
How then did Germany rearm? It is now widely contended that the peace treaty imposed on Germany at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 was too harsh, thus provoking it to seize the chance to rearm and eventually retaliate.
In fact, the Treaty of Versailles had punished Germany no more harshly than the Germans had punished the defeated Russia in 1917-18. And the Allies’ punishment of Germany at the end of World War II was even harsher than that imposed after the previous war. The humiliation imposed by the Allies in 1945, after the death of Hitler, actually kept the peace decade after decade.
The immediate aftermath of war was spiced with reassuring sights that daily life in Australia would soon become normal.
But there were occasional shocks. The economy still suffered from inflation. Between 1914 and 1919 prices doubled, but people’s wages and salaries lagged far behind. Even while the great battles had raged in France, economic unrest stoked industrial troubles on the Australian coalfields, railways and wharves. In 1919, yet again, more days were lost through strikes than in any previous year. In 1920 in Western Australia a teachers’ strike disrupted family life. In Broken Hill, the miners were already engaged in a strike that lasted for a year and a half: they were called “the spuds and onion days”.
The far outback suffered heavily, because many of its biggest employers — the goldmines — had to close. The price of gold did not change during the war but the cost of mining soared. Nearly all gold towns erected a war memorial but most families whose surnames were inscribed had left the district. In the typical city, the unemployment rate was as high in the 10 years after the war than in the 10 years before.
Meanwhile, an epidemic arrived by sea. Called the Spanish flu, though perhaps a product of US military camps and deplorable conditions on the European battlefields, it created near-panic as it spread across the globe. In February 1919 the premier of NSW issued an order closing churches. He banned race meetings and shut down cinemas, libraries, auction rooms and other places where crowds might assemble.
The malady infected the ablebodied more than the old. In all, 12,000 Australians died: that was more lives than Gallipoli had snatched away.
Many of the illnesses of wartime were not initially acknowledged. Tens of thousands of returned Australians suffered from trauma. Only in the past 20 years have historians detected how numerous were those who suffered from what was called “shell shock”. When the most popular of generals, “Pompey” Elliott, died in 1931, the news that he had committed suicide was at first hidden from a public that so respected or admired him. Mental illnesses, caused by the stress of war, were not yet socially acceptable. Few doctors were capable of handling them.
It seems likely that far more soldiers were wounded physically rather than mentally. Of the 333,000 Australians who served overseas in the war, half were wounded in action or gassed. Caring for the wounded, the widows, and the orphans called for a massive increase in the postwar federal budgets.
Another uncountable loss was in talent, wasted talent. So many of those Australians who were killed in action or died prematurely in the following decade showed qualities of leadership. They would have been prime ministers, premiers, judges, leaders of the trade unions and churches, university professors and the principals of schools, poets and musicians, goahead farmers and pastoralists, surgeons and scientists, and the pacesetters in many professions and trades.
For more than a century, Australia had been a man’s land; within the adult population the women were far out-numbered. Then came World War I and the departure of an army of men for overseas war zones. For the first time since the arrival of the First Fleet, this country held more females than males. Even after the war, the scarcity of young men prevailed. In the 20s, the unmarried young woman became a reminder of the war.
After the armistice came a collision of ideas and political movements. Russia’s victorious Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 — itself one effect of the war — preached radical ideas in Australian workplaces. In 1920, the newborn local Communist Party called for the overthrow of parliaments, the police forces, army and navy.
In the following 20 years, farleft ideas gained a toehold in universities and creative writers’ groups and in some Protestant pulpits. They won a strong foothold in the trade union movement. They created divisions in the Labor Party, already divided.
The traditional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were temporarily heightened by World War I and the accompanying insurrection in Ireland.
In 1916, the thorny question of whether Australia should compel young men to fight a war in Europe began to split the Labor Party. The articulate Catholic orator, Bishop Daniel Mannix, fresh from Ireland, became the most ardent opponent of conscription. Not perhaps since the 1850s had an Australian political figure — one holding no seat in parliament — so shaped and sharpened a major public debate.
The Australian people, by a narrow majority, twice voted against their government’s proposal to conscript and compel fit men to join their fellow countrymen at the battlefields. So enormous were the number of casualties on the Western Front that Britain and New Zealand were already conscripting soldiers, but Australia refused. The refusal became part of the long-term policy of the Labor Party.
The prime minister who declared war on Mannix was Hughes, a Sydney Protestant of Welsh ancestry. As Labor’s leader he became prime minister in 1915, ardently supported the war against Germany, and believed that Australia should — come what may — send more soldiers to France in the dark days of the following year. He aroused such fierce opposition that he had to leave the Labor Party.
A wily politician, Hughes remained prime minister, thanks to the support he now received from his former non-Labor opponents. At the peace conferences in France in 1919 he made his international name, appearing as the outspoken leader from Australia and the scorner of US president Woodrow Wilson.
He, more than any other leader within the British Empire, predicted Japan would become a first-rate military power and a special danger to Australia.
An astonishing episode in 1920 was the expulsion from the federal parliament of Irish-born Hugh Mahon. An ally of Mannix, Mahon was a longstanding Labor politician from the West Australian goldfields.
Addressing a Melbourne outdoors rally in favour of independence for Ireland, he expressed the fervent wish that “the foundations of this bloody and accursed British Empire would be rocked — if God dispensed true justice”.
As a result of his rather wild and anti-British outburst he was not simply suspended from parliament but expelled, by 34 votes to
17. His seat in parliament was declared to be vacant.
The Mahon episode — ironically it was debated on Armistice Day, 1920 — was a sign of a troubled nation. Surely parliament justifies its existence partly because it serves as a vital channel for discontent. To block that channel worried many loyal citizens. After the Hughes Split, the Labor Party became more a Catholic party. In the following half-century, Labor did not often win office. In that period it produced only three prime ministers — James Scullin, John Curtin and Ben Chifley — each of whom was reared in Catholic families of Irish descent.
Perhaps we now have a tendency to exaggerate religious rivalries and tensions in old-time Australia. There it was much easier than in modern Britain and in the US for a Catholic to attain high office. While it has long been the custom to view the wartime debates and divisions that centred on conscription as primarily Protestant versus Catholic, these debates also reflected clashing viewpoints that existed inside every church.
A large and influential minority of Australians of that era acquired a distaste for war. In the next war they hoped their nation would be neutral, not taking into account that it could be neutral only if the potential enemy gave its consent. Japan in 1941 was to give no such consent.
In some ways World War I seriously hurt Australia. But that war would have been more devastating if we, like France and Belgium, Russia and Turkey and Romania, had been invaded by a foreign army. We were saved partly by our isolation, a factor that was to work against us in World War II.
We would have suffered even more severely if our sea lanes had been endangered often by enemy cruisers and submarines. Most of the European nations suffered from a shortage of food as the war went on. Even bread was rationed in many European countries. On Armistice Day in 1918, millions of Germans were close to starvation. Indeed, their nation surrendered partly because civilian morale was collapsing. Here, in contrast, there was no shortage of food.
Australia gained enormously because it was on the winning side. It is curious that the word armistice, with its peaceful connotations, can dominate our memory of the war. As a nation, we too often forget that we were victorious. Anzac Day is the nation’s abiding and commanding memory of World War I, and because Gallipoli is widely but mistakenly viewed as a disastrous defeat, we forget that the war as whole ended in a decisive victory. Most people who had a part in that victory were proud of their country, vowing it was the best in a turbulent world.
What would have happened if Australia was on the losing side?
If Germany had won the war decisively, it would have imposed a harsh peace treaty on Britain, France, Australia and other defeated nations. Germany would have demanded a huge sum in reparations, and Australia would have been a payer. Germany if victorious would have sunk or taken over the British navy and, of course, the small Australian navy. It probably would have confiscated most of the British cargo fleet, which was still the largest in the world.
Berlin, if victorious, certainly would have reclaimed German New Guinea, which had been captured by Australia in 1914. It might have annexed Papua, too, and occupied Thursday Island, thus giving it control of Torres Strait. It is likely that German banks, shipping lines and manufacturers would have acquired a leading role in our commerce.
In May 1917, when Germany’s leaders were still confident of winning the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II set down his own wish list. He would demand the vital British island of Malta in the Mediterranean; he sought Madeira and other islands in the North Atlantic as German naval bases; and he resolved that the Belgian Congo and French West Africa would become German possessions. And many strategic resources, he insisted, should be under Germany’s direct or indirect control, including Australia’s wool and Russia’s manganese.
Armistice Day is certainly a celebration of peace. It is also a celebration of victory and of all those Australians, who through bravery and determination, gave us that victory.
Geoffrey Blainey’s latest work is
The Story of Australia’s People, in two volumes
.
