Arthur Tange, page 19
The episode also had implications for Tange’s relations with Allen Brown and his department. As Tange put it. Brown ‘was no more help than you might expect’. In an ambiguous comment, Tange reported that ‘relations with the PM’s Dept are in future to be put on a more formal level. Moreover I find that Brown does seem to understand the language of derision and blunt contradiction—not a style I like, but we are forced to it.’270 Whether he liked it or not, it was a style that he would choose to employ for years to come.
The following weeks saw intense negotiations, including a second conference in London where Australia was represented by Spender. Tange remained there for some time, but was none the wiser as to Britain’s policies or Menzies’ mind. It seemed possible that the crisis might end without the use of force, until late October when British, French and Israeli ministers colluded in a highly secret plan. Israel would invade Egypt and advance towards the canal; Britain and France would issue an ultimatum to both Israel and Egypt, which Egypt would doubtless decline; and Anglo-French forces would then intervene, supposedly to separate the combatants and protect the canal zone but in fact to reassert their control. The collusion was hidden even from most of the British Cabinet, let alone Britain’s friends and allies. Despite being kept in the dark, Menzies continued to offer loyal support to Eden as the diplomatic and military steps in this charade were taken. By this time the Prime Minister was in Canberra with his Cabinet, but once again Casey was away when things were happening. As the most critical phase in the crisis opened, he was in London en route to the United Nations General Assembly. There he worked to support the idea, put forward by the Canadians and Americans, of a United Nations Expeditionary Force to keep the peace and remove the Anglo-French forces. In Canberra, Tange was once again working with Philip McBride as Acting Minister for External Affairs.
When Australia heard news reports of the Israeli invasion of Egypt, Menzies, McBride, Brown and Tange were preparing a parliamentary statement on the other international crisis of the day, the Soviet military intervention in Hungary. Tange recommended that Australia make an immediate statement calling for Israeli withdrawal and referral of the issue to the United Nations. Brown opined that this would be a mistake, distracting attention from Menzies’ intended statement on Hungary. As Tange later recorded in a confidential report to Casey, ‘This view prevailed. There was no serious discussion of the Israeli invasion.’ On the next day the Australians heard, again through the radio, of the Anglo-French ultimatum. Before a Cabinet meeting called to discuss the issue, Tange told McBride that he assumed that Australia would have to support the United Kingdom, although the British had acted without consulting Australia. Nevertheless he urged that Australia should ‘stand on the sidelines as far as practicable’ because of the effect that Anglo-French action, without United Nations authorisation, would have on ‘our relations with Asia and other countries’. He again urged that Australia call on Israel to withdraw.
Cabinet took a different view, supporting Britain even though Australia was thoroughly confused by Eden’s actions and London had not even sought Australian support. (In a subsequent marginal comment at this point of his report to Casey, Tange pointedly noted that Brown was Cabinet Secretary as well as Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department and was therefore present ex officio at the Cabinet meeting. Tange only attended Cabinet when invited, which on this occasion he was not.) Tange then sought McBride’s approval for a telegram of instructions to Ronald Walker, Australia’s representative at the Security Council (to which Australia had been elected for one year), which said that Walker should support a resolution calling on Israel to withdraw. Brown, however, advised that a majority of Cabinet would have opposed any criticism of Israel. Tange retorted that:
In my view, there were occasions when the Minister responsible for External Affairs had to decide what was the course of action best calculated to protect Australian interests in the particular circumstances of the Security Council, of which individual Cabinet Ministers could not be expected to have very much knowledge.
With that off his chest, Tange suggested a revision of the passage, which McBride approved.
In the middle of the night, around 1 a.m., McBride and Tange were summoned to the Prime Minister’s office to join a group of ministers. Menzies read out the text of a message he proposed to send to Eden, promising Australia’s full support and accepting that consultation with the Commonwealth had not been possible. The assembled ministers expressed their warm approval. When invited to comment, Tange said that Menzies ‘was generously relieving the United Kingdom of an obligation to consult, and that this was not the first occasion upon which the U.K. had failed to do so’. Menzies replied that consultation with the whole Commonwealth would have taken a week and was therefore impracticable.
This set the pattern for the following weeks of intense diplomatic activity, during which Menzies sent a number of telegrams to Eden and made several parliamentary statements. Tange’s advice was only sought at very late stages, when he could only suggest minor changes, designed to restrain Menzies from giving Eden a blank cheque.271 On the eve of the Anglo-French intervention Tange cabled McIntyre in London, suggesting arguments that might persuade the British to postpone operations. McIntyre was to present these views on his own account, not ‘as Australian Government views’. Menzies had agreed to such a message being sent at the official level but he was not asked to approve its terms.272 In any case, it was to no avail. The British and French intervened and then almost as precipitately withdrew under severe financial pressure from the United States. They had succeeded only in attracting worldwide condemnation without securing any of their goals in Egypt.
At the end of November Menzies made a statement to the House of Representatives, defending his government’s association with Britain’s ignominious failure. When given an indication of what Menzies was likely to say, Tange again sought through McBride to urge the Prime Minister to tone down its terms. To criticise the United States and the United Nations for actions that had forced the withdrawal of the Anglo-French forces would, he said, be counterproductive, further isolating Australia ‘from the whole world’ and widening the rift between Britain and the United States.273 Menzies totally disregarded this advice, referring to both the United Nations and the United States in patronising and sarcastic tones. While Menzies was preparing a parliamentary statement, probably this one, Tange passed though the Prime Minister’s office on other business. Menzies looked up and said angrily: ‘Tange, you have been no help to me at all on this.’ From Menzies’ perspective it was fair comment, for Tange was clearly at odds with his policy and attitudes. Nevertheless Tange was taken aback since Menzies had made it clear throughout the crisis that he wanted no advice from a ‘Casey man’.274 The outburst probably owed much to the nervous tension that Menzies often suffered before going into the House for a major debate and speaking with apparently relaxed authority. Much later, Tange wondered if this might have marked the beginning of his fall from Menzies’ favour. If so, the rift was not terminal for Tange’s knighthood and salary promotion were still to come. But the Suez episode may well have warned Menzies that Tange’s work in developing a professional foreign office might not always produce advice that he wanted to hear.
On the same day as Menzies’ statement, Tange sent to Casey a strictly personal, four-page denunciation of Australian policy, as revealed over the crisis. Among the points that he ‘venture[d] to suggest’ that Casey might emphasise in Cabinet were the importance of the United Nations, for all its faults, precisely because it was respected by the United States under both Democrat and Republican administrations. Tange clearly implied that British and Australian tactics could only ‘drive us into isolation’, alienating not only the Asian countries ‘with whom we have to live out our future’ but also Canada, the United States and western Europe. Moreover, Tange argued, Britain’s failure to consult the Americans before taking military action might create a precedent for the Americans themselves in the Far East, where Australia had long feared ‘impulsive, rash American actions without prior consultation’, referring specifically to Korea, Indochina and the Taiwan straits.275
As Tange had noted, the Suez crisis exposed the military and financial weakness of post-1945 Britain and its dependence on American support. In 1957, only a few months after he had poured scorn on Washington’s Suez policy, Menzies announced that Australia would now standardise its military equipment as far as possible with that of the United States, instead of that of the United Kingdom. The basis of Australian defence policy would be ‘to fit ourselves for close cooperation with the United States in the South-East Asian area’.276 In the subsequent years Tange became increasingly disturbed by some of the implications of this decision, especially as it affected Australia’s relations with Indonesia. Throughout the 1950s Australia had resisted Indonesia’s claim to take over West New Guinea, the only part of the former Netherlands East Indies that had been retained by the Dutch after 1949. While referring publicly to legal and ethnic considerations, Australian ministers were privately most concerned about the strategic importance of keeping West New Guinea in friendly, non-communist hands. In 1957 Australia, which administered the eastern half of New Guinea under a United Nations trusteeship, and the Netherlands issued a joint statement, pledging to strengthen administrative cooperation between their territories. The implication was that the two halves of the island would eventually achieve independence, either jointly (uniting the whole island) or separately, rather than acceding to the Indonesian claim. Indonesia and many other newly independent Asian countries were furious.
Tange and his colleagues in External Affairs realised that Australia’s pro-Dutch stance was becoming increasingly untenable and sought to adjust Australian strategic policy. In 1958, influenced by Indonesia’s growing military strength and conscious of both Australian and Dutch military weakness, External Affairs and Defence collaborated on major studies that gave greater emphasis to Indonesia’s strategic importance to Australia and slightly lowered that of West New Guinea. Tange’s membership of the Defence Committee was central to this process. As he later said, his main aim at this time was to get the service chiefs ‘to think’—to think anew, that is, about the relative strategic importance of Indonesia and West New Guinea, rather than relying upon the traditional assumption that it was ‘vital’ to have West New Guinea in friendly hands.277 As part of the reassessment process, the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Dr Subandrio, was invited to visit Australia in February 1959. After lengthy discussions with the Cabinet, in which Tange’s advice played a significant part at crucial times, Casey and Subandrio signed a communiqué that stated Australia would not oppose an agreement to transfer the sovereignty of West New Guinea from the Dutch to the Indonesians, provided the agreement was reached by peaceful means. There was a major outcry in Australia as voices from across the political spectrum denounced this ‘appeasement’ of Indonesia.
The problem for the government was that, while public opinion wanted Australia to stand firm against the Indonesian claim, the international context was making this position almost impossible to sustain. The American stance was crucial. After giving covert support to an anti-Sukarno rebellion in some outer islands in 1958, the Americans adopted the view that the best way to keep a united Indonesia in the non-communist camp would be to support Sukarno, while developing links with the Indonesian armed forces. They increasingly accepted the Indonesian argument that a friendly Indonesia, incorporating West New Guinea, would be more valuable to the Western world than to have West New Guinea in friendly hands but next to a hostile, perhaps communist, Indonesia. Thus the incorporation of West New Guinea into Indonesia would be an acceptable price for the West to pay. As the Americans adopted this view, it was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain Australia’s traditional opposition to the Indonesian claim.
In this context Tange thought it time to bring defence policy into line with possible overseas commitments. He continued to press the members of the Defence Committee, both civilian and uniformed, to revise Australian strategic policy. In February 1959, the month that Dr Subandrio visited Australia, Cabinet received the Defence Committee’s periodic review of ‘the strategic basis of Australian defence policy’. Using arguments and even phrases that were characteristically Tange’s, the committee drew attention to ‘the rapidly increasing military strength of Indonesia and its potential threat to Australia’s interests’. The commitment of Australian forces in South-East Asia (apart from those already in Malaya) would be dependent on American deployments, but the committee emphasised ‘situations in which Australian forces should be prepared to act independently at least for a time’. These scenarios included conflict with Indonesia over West New Guinea and a limited war with Indonesia ‘while Allied forces were fully engaged in other areas’. The committee’s conclusion was that ‘our forces should be designed primarily with the ability to act independently of allies’.278 The direction of Tange’s thinking was clear. Australia could not assume that it would automatically have American support in the event of conflict with Indonesia; consequently, if Australia wanted to protect and promote its interests in the region, it should be prepared to act independently.
This approach was unacceptable to Cabinet. In March it recorded that it ‘found difficulty in accepting this conclusion’ and returned it to the Chiefs of Staff Committee—not the full Defence Committee on which Tange sat, but only ns four uniformed members (the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the three single-service chiefs).279 After some months’ deliberation, they returned with an explanation (almost certainly coordinated with Tange) that they were seeking greater independence as a long-term aim, not a short-term goal. The chiefs repeated that Australia had to be prepared to meet some situations in which allied support might not be provided for some time.280 Cabinet was still unhappy, and asserted as its conclusion that
in any war on the South East Asian mainland, in which Australia would be fighting with major allies, there should be no obligation on Australia or any expectation on the part of allies that Australia, with its limited population and resources, should necessarily put forward self-supporting Forces.
It conceded, rather grudgingly, that it was
conceivable that Australia could face a situation where it would be called upon to defend for a limited time independently of allies. This possibility indicates that the Australian Forces should be developed to be self-supporting to some degree. But this is a more limited and less ambitious concept of independent action then |sic] appeared to be envisaged in the strategic basis paper
Tange had succeeded in bringing the service chiefs around to his arguments, only to be firmly overruled by Cabinet.281
Tange attributed this setback to the consistent desire of the ministers in the Liberal-Country Party coalition to claim that the Australian people could rely upon American support as long as the coalition, the government that had secured the ANZUS alliance, remained in office. Talk of independently capable forces might undermine that appeal. McEwen later told Tange that his ministerial colleagues also thought that the talk of independent forces sounded like a blank cheque for the armed services. Both arguments probably influenced the result. Little was known of this at the time, but it was another sign that Tange and his department were developing ideas with which their political masters, who had now been in office for a decade, were not totally comfortable. It was also an indication that the concept of ‘self-reliance’ in defence, like many of Tange’s ideas on defence and strategy that would be more favourably received in the 1970s, was shaped by his experience on the Defence Committee in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Tange and Menzies 1960–61
In February 1960, when Casey retired from politics, Menzies decided that he could not yet appoint the man who was obviously being groomed for External Affairs and who had already served several times as acting minister, Sir Garfield Barwick. Having entered politics late, already knighted and widely regarded as the most formidable barrister in Sydney, Barwick was Attorney-General and heavily engaged in major legal reforms. Menzies decided to take on the portfolio of External Affairs himself. The decision was widely criticised, not least within Menzies’ own party, as few thought that any Prime Minister could simultaneously fulfil the responsibilities in Australia and overseas of a foreign minister. Nevertheless. Menzies retained the portfolio for nearly two years, until the Cabinet reconstruction that followed the December 1961 election.
Tange inevitably worked more closely with Menzies during these two years, both in Canberra and as an adviser on Menzies’ forays overseas, especially to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conferences, on which Menzies placed great store. Tange accompanied Menzies to the 1960 and 1961 Prime Ministers’ conferences, the only years other than 1955 in which he did so.282 This proximity did not boost Tange’s position as it had in earlier years when he had worked closely with Spender or Casey. It seems rather to have made more evident to Menzies that the Australian foreign office, which he had encouraged Tange to develop, was becoming a powerful force, influencing policies in directions that did not accord with Menzies’ own preferences. Menzies became increasingly aware that Tange and his department did not agree with, for example, Menzies’ views on apartheid and the place of South Africa in the Commonwealth; or with what looked like uncritical reliance on Australia’s alliances with Britain and the United States; or with the White Australia Policy, on which Menzies was becoming the principal obstacle to the reforms for which External Affairs was pressing. Menzies had now become increasingly confident of his own ability to deal directly with American and British leaders, either disregarding or preempting advice from External Affairs. Such practices sometimes caused him severe problems, as with an ill-advised initiative at the United Nations General Assembly in October 1960, designed to assist the Americans and British. Nevertheless, this experience did not lead Menzies to hold departmental opinion in higher regard.
