Inferno - Max Hastings [262]
In Australia, support for Britain was much stronger. In 1939, tens of thousands of volunteers responded like Rod Wells, who thought, “There’s a war going on! The Old Country needs help … Let’s go and show them what we can do.” Three divisions of such men fought with distinction in the Mediterranean, and a further two later joined them in New Guinea and other Pacific campaigns. But the war also revealed political stresses and divisions “down under.” Most of the half million Americans who passed through Australia between 1942 and 1945 warmed to the country socially, but their commanders deplored Australian parochialism, vicious trades union practices especially in the docks, and supposed lack of energy in pursuing the war. MacArthur suggested sourly that the Australian spirit had been corroded by twenty years of socialist government. On 26 October 1942, the New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin published a lacerating critique of the Australian war effort:
The normal difficulties of waging a coalition war have been increased in Australia by one factor about which Australians themselves complain—the labor problem. There is no question in the opinion of many Australians that Australian labor’s insistence upon its “rights,” its determination to work no longer than a stated number of hours and to knock off Saturday afternoons and holidays, and its general attitude toward and approach to the war, have hampered the full development of the United Nations’ war effort in Australia. The labor attitude in the “land down under” can perhaps best be described as “complacency”; many of the workers seem primarily interested in retaining peacetime privileges.
Baldwin observed that the consequence of Australian labour unions’ obstructionism was that many logistical tasks had to be performed by American soldiers. He concluded: “Many of us in the democracies of all countries, loving personal liberty and our casual, easy, carefree ways of life of peacetime, have forgotten that war is a hard taskmaster and that the ways of peace are not the ways of war.” Baldwin’s remarks caused a storm in Australia, where they were deeply resented, but they were founded in harsh reality, and the British government shared the correspondent’s sentiments. Many Australians earned admiration as warriors, but a substantial number exercised their democratic privileges to stay away from the battlefield.
In Canada likewise, overseas military service remained voluntary, causing the army to suffer a chronic shortage of infantrymen. Though Canadians played important roles in the northwest Europe and Italian campaigns, the Battle of the Atlantic and the bomber offensive, most of French Canada wanted no part in the struggle. “A nasty evening in Montreal, where the French Canadians booed and spat at us and several of us were thrown out of bars,” recorded an RAF flight trainee among a party in transit through the region. In August 1942, a sullen 59 percent of French-Canadians told pollsters they did not believe they would have had to participate in the war but for Canada’s membership in the British Empire.
In the Middle East and Asia, some subject peoples displayed fiercer opposition to the conflict. They paid little heed to the nature of the German, Italian and Japanese regimes, merely choosing to view their colonial oppressors’ enemies as their own prospective allies. The British exercised de facto rule over Egypt not as an acknowledged colonial possession but through a draconian interpretation of the bilateral defence treaty. Many, indeed most Egyptians, gave passive support to the Axis; King Farouk took impending British defeat for granted. One of his army officers, Capt. Anwar Sadat, the twenty-two-year-old son of a government clerk who later became Egypt’s president, wrote: “Our enemy was primarily, if not solely, Great Britain.” In 1940, Sadat approached Gen. Aziz el-Masri, the inspector-general of the army and