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Anzacs unimpressed by Menzies | WORLD | NEWS | tvnz.co.nz

Anzac veterans have good reason to resent British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but many Australians remain just as unimpressed by their own "subservient" World War II leader, Robert Menzies, according to the author of a new book.

Menzies put empire ahead of nation in committing 18,000 Australian troops to a futile campaign against Hitler's German juggernaut in Greece in 1941, according to Peter Ewer.

The ill-starred Anzac campaign had uncanny parallels with the only other operation involving an Anzac corps, at Gallipoli in 1915, Ewer says.

Both were inspired by Churchill, who in World War I was Britain's Navy Minister, both were badly planned by British
military leaders and both ended in defeat and evacuation.

Many Anzac veterans of the fighting in Greece and Crete remain "pretty unimpressed" by Churchill after more than 60 years of critical reflection, Ewer says.

"But they're also unimpressed, it must be said, by the Australian prime minister, who was Robert Menzies," he said in an interview.

"He allowed the Australian soldiers to be sent to Greece without the Australian cabinet having a briefing from our army commanders.

"So you've got a vast body of Australian troops going to fight the best army in the world without the Australian cabinet knowing their prospects were pretty poor."

How poor?

A "token" allied force of 50,000, two thirds of them Anzacs, was up against six or eight times as many Germans - several hundred thousand.

German aerial supremacy was even more pronounced - up to 800 planes compared with Britain's 70.

Small wonder the Anzacs suffered such a casualty rate, losing over 1,500 in a month of fighting in Greece and Crete, with several thousand wounded and some 5,000 spending four years in POW camps.

"Certainly Menzies calculated his policy in terms of serving the empire," said Ewer.

"It had fairly profound consequences for Menzies because it basically discredited his prime ministership."

Within a couple of months Menzies had been removed from office, though he came back in 1949 to serve a record stint of 17 more years, in the process becoming John Howard's political hero.

Ewer, author of Forgotten Anzacs, says Greece and Crete may not be widely remembered, but represent a significant turning point in Australian military affairs.

"In 12 months there was a change from subservience to something much more assertive," he said.

"In 1942 John Curtin jacked up and refused to allow Churchill to send Australian troops to Burma."

It was part of the Labor leader's change of emphasis from Britain to the United States, a shift credited with saving
Australia's neck in later battles in the Coral Sea.

"Churchill only represented British interests," Ewer said.

"It's just that we failed to calculate our own.

"Probably in 1941 our national interest was in at least knowing what a major army formation was about to do and its probabilities in doing it."

British bungling at Gallipoli was one thing, Ewer says, but in Greece Churchill authorised his commanders to leave the Anzacs to their fate if their rescue compromised wider British interests.

What took the Anzacs to Greece in the first place?

Churchill's "dilettantism", according to Ewer.

"He thought that by sending a token army to Greece he could persuade Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey to come into the war against Hitler.

"(Italian dictator Benito) Mussolini had invaded Greece six months earlier, hoping to acquire his own empire in rivalry to Hitler.

"The only problem was that the Greeks, impoverished though they were, rose as one to fight the Italians and bring off the first allied victory on land in World War II.

"Hitler was looking to bail Mussolini out of his problems in Greece as a prelude to his own invasion of the Soviet Union.

"He didn't want a war on his southern flank.

"There were some fairly profound geo-political dimensions to it, but the British decision was the worst strategic blunder of the war.

"Left to their own devices, the Australians with British armour would have been able to clear Mussolini out of northern Africa and prevent Rommel from landing.

"So splitting the available forces in Libya and Greece ensured defeat in both theatres."

Forgotten Anzacs by Peter Ewer, is published by Scribe.

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