[Editor: This article, regarding a speech made by John Curtin on Tuesday 26 January (Australia Day) 1943, during the Second World War (1939-1945), was published in The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 27 January 1943.]
A plea for justice
In one of the bluntest yet most logical of his speeches as Prime Minister Mr. Curtin last night broadcast to the Allied world, and particularly to the people of the United States, what may be described as a plea for justice. It was not a cry for help to be given to a relatively weak nation against a mighty nation with incomparably greater resources and manpower. It was a plea rather for justice to be done to a strategic and an intellectual concept which has never had full justice done to it.
Mr. Curtin did not say, in so many words, “Save Australia from Japan.” He asked that full consideration be given, for the soundest strategic reasons, to the unwisdom of allowing Japan to build herself up to maximum strength in the Pacific, checked by only a modest “holding” force of the United Nations, during the unknown period necessary for the task of crushing Germany and her European satellites.
A twice-fought fight
It is almost exactly a year ago since a similar controversial battle was fought out. Then, as now, Mr. Curtin was Australia’s chief protagonist, and he won a limited victory which, circumscribed though it was, has had an incalculable effect upon the fate of the Pacific. He won the measure of American aid which has since then come to us. Welcome as that aid has been, it has enabled us to fight what is in effect only a defensive war.
True, for the first time the Japanese has tasted defeat on the perimeter of his conquests. But during the whole period he has been steadily strengthening himself in his easily conquered Asian empire. And because it is patent to competent observers in this part of the world that this process means that time is working for the Japanese and against us, the plea has to be made that the United Nations will realise this and devote sufficient strength to the Pacific to turn the war in this area from a defensive to an offensive one.
Mr. Curtin has rightly emphasised that Australia is seeking aid for this purpose not on any ad misericordiam basis but as civilisation’s trustee in the Southern Pacific. And because he was addressing primarily an essentially realistic nation he was justified in employing the realistic argument that if Australia were overwhelmed as a result of insufficient support from her Allies the way would be open for a Japanese attack upon the west coast of the American continent from Alaska to Cape Horn. It is regrettable that such polemical discussions of high strategy have to be conducted in the hearing of the enemy; but experience has proved that only plain speaking can disturb what might develop into a too-static conception of what the great fight for civilisation demands.
A year ago today
The issue remains substantially the same. What The Argus said a year ago today is apposite: “Australia does not ask for sympathetic consideration in the shape of protective action — whether strategically right or wrong — to save her from an impending danger. What she seeks is the immediate application of the best thought of all the Powers concerned (with swift action as a corollary) to an aspect of the world situation which she claims to be able to perceive more clearly than they do because she is nearer to it.”
That Australia was right a year ago must be apparent to anyone able to envisage what would have happened in the Pacific if a deaf ear had been turned to her logical pleading then. Again today her voice is the voice of reason. We do not ask that the European struggle shall be relegated to a secondary place; but we do ask that the seriousness of Japan’s threat to civilisation shall be recognised and be met with something more than a “holding” force.
Source:
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.), 27 January 1943, p. 2
[Editor: The original text has been separated into paragraphs.]
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