Last Bastion

From Down Under there rose a cry that should have roused the fight in the entire U.S. public. It came from Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, a onetime mild-mannered trade-union journalist who in his country's greatest hour of need found words that rolled like Walt Whitman's: "We have no limits. . . . We have no qualms. . . . We will not yield a yard of our soil. . . . We fight with what we have and what we have is our all."

"Our all" in Australia last week meant just that. Australians were stripped for action and fighting mad. The gingerbread was gone. War profits were cut, all business and industry under strict control, the personal actions and property of every man and woman subject to Government orders. "There are three means of service," said Curtin: "in the fighting forces, in the labor forces, in the essential industries."

Broadcasting to the "united people" of the U.S. from the united people of Australia, John Curtin said:

"Remember, we are the Anzac breed. Our men stormed Gallipoli. They swept through the Libyan Desert. They were the 'Rats of Tobruk.' . . . They were the men who fought under bitter, sarcastic, pugnacious [General Henry] Gordon Bennett down Malaya, and were still fighting when the surrender of Singapore came.*

"We will advance over blackened ruins, through blasted and fireswept cities, across scorched plains. . . . Our fighting forces are born attackers. We will hit the enemy wherever we can. . . . It means risks, but safety first is the devil's watchword today."

These were brave words. Curtin knew that not they alone, nor Australia alone, could win a war. Australia, he said, looked to the U.S., "to you who are sweating in workshops to turn out the vital munitions of war." Australia also looked to the U.S. "for counsel and advice." That was why, Curtin explained, his country (with "no belittling of the old country") had insisted that the Pacific War Council should be in Washington. It was "a matter of some regret, after 95 days of Japan's staggering advance south, ever south," that Australia had not yet obtained "firsthand contact with America." Accordingly, he announced that Minister of External Affairs Dr. Herbert Vere Evatt was being sent to Washington. A great leftist authority on constitutional law who lectured at Harvard in 1938, tough-tongued Minister Evatt should be able to make Prime Minister Curtin's message stick.

"I give you this warning," John Curtin concluded: "Australia is the last bastion between the west coast of America and the Japanese. If Australia goes, the Americas are wide open."

*In the Malayan campaign, Australia announced, 17,031 officers and men (compared with 13,335 in the Middle East) had been killed or captured.

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