Joining The Fight: Stevan Eldred-Grigg's argument for New Zealand staying out of the Second World War fails not only on the hard-headed grounds of preserving the country’s strategic and economic interests; and not just on the soft-hearted grounds of duty and loyalty to the nation that had given New Zealand birth; but, ultimately, on the grounds of the damage it would have inflicted on New Zealand’s soul – for want of a better word.
SHOULD NEW ZEALAND have declared war on Germany on 3
September 1939? This is the startling question posed by Stevan Eldred-Grigg,
one of New Zealand’s more interesting historians, in an essay posted on TheSpinoff. I say “startling” because, while many wish that New Zealand could have stayed
out of World War I, the number suggesting we should have stayed out of the existential
struggle against fascism is vanishingly small.
The first great global conflict of the Twentieth Century may
have been a vicious brawl between competing imperial powers, tricked out in the
bunting of King and Country and, later, as a noble crusade “to make the world
safe for Democracy”, but the Second World War was the real thing. Adolf Hitler
and his regime constituted a clear and present danger to human civilisation
which simply had to be stopped.
Eldred-Grigg’s revisionism should not, however, be dismissed
out of hand. Nothing is lost by holding the icons of our history up to the
light and scrutinizing them closely for flaws and blemishes. Such scrutiny
becomes an urgent necessity when the accusation is made that the historical
icon in question depicts a lie. Let us then take a closer look at
Eldred-Grigg’s argument.
His case against New Zealand’s participation in the war is
presented in two parts. The first suggests that the “hard-headed” strategic and
economic arguments for joining the fight against Hitler simply do not stack up.
Great Britain, he says, was simply too far away to offer the slightest
strategic protection, and Nazi Germany too far away to pose a credible threat.
Our export trade, he implies, would have prospered regardless of which nation
emerged victorious.
The second line of attack is directed at what Eldred-Grigg
calls the “soft-hearted” reasons for ranging ourselves alongside the “Mother
Country”. Poland, he suggests, wasn’t worth fighting for – being little better
than Nazi Germany in terms of its politics. Likewise, the Mother Country,
herself. Great Britain remained an imperial power whose hands, vis-à-vis the
promotion of freedom and democracy, were still far from clean. “[B]eliefs about
freedom and democracy, together with emotions about duty and loyalty”,
Eldred-Grigg suggests, were an insufficient justification for plunging New
Zealand into someone else’s war.
But, Eldred-Griggs revisionism is wrong on all counts.
Strategically-speaking, Great Britain was not that far away
at all. In 1939, the Royal Navy was still capable of considerable force
projection – even into the Southern Hemisphere. Moreover, if Britain had been
defeated by Germany, and the Royal Navy had fallen into the hands of the Kriegsmarine,
how long does Eldred-Grigg think it would have taken the Fuhrer’s reflagged
battleships to come a-calling?
As for New Zealand’s economic situation on 3rd September 1939
– well, it was parlous. The Labour Finance Minister had earlier that year
visited Britain seeking the continued co-operation of the Bank of England and
the City of London in extending New Zealand’s lines of credit. This they were
most reluctant to do. Labour’s social welfare reforms and her state house
construction programme did not meet with the British bankers’ approval. Had war
not broken out in September 1939, it is almost certain that British capital
would have put a suffocating financial squeeze on the errant left-wing
government of its far-flung economic colony.
The outbreak of war radically shifted the pieces on the
economic board in New Zealand’s favour. Michael Joseph Savage’s famous
declaration: “Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we
range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go; where she
stands, we stand.”, wasn’t simply a “soft-hearted” acknowledgement of “duty and
loyalty”. It was also a hard-headed decision to do what was required to keep the
workers’ government in office.
The weakness of Eldred-Grigg’s argument lies precisely in
its refusal to acknowledge the political context in which the decision to go to
war was taken. Does he really suppose that a left-wing New Zealand government
which refused to join Canada, Australia and South Africa at Britain’s side
could have endured in office for more than a few days? Has he forgotten that,
as Mickey Savage was committing New Zealand to a war against fascism, the
Soviet Union was preparing to roll across the Polish border in fulfilment of
the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet Pact? Can he not see that the National
Party and the newspapers would have accused the Labour Party, with ample
justification, of taking up a position indistinguishable from that of the
Moscow-aligned Communist Party? An historian of Eldred-Grigg’s standing must,
surely, acknowledge that Savage, Nash, and the prime-Minister-in-waiting, Peter
Fraser, would not have been able to convince their own Labour caucus – let
alone the broader New Zealand electorate – that such a position was even
remotely tenable?
A decision to remain neutral in September 1939 would have
produced only one thing – a crushing victory for the right of New Zealand
politics. All of Labour’s work between 1935 and 1939 would have been undone.
The state housing programme would have been abandoned, and what the National
Party leader, Sid Holland, described as the “applied lunacy” of the Social
Security legislation would have been swept away.
That is the price the New Zealand working-class – whose
interests Eldred-Grigg has long and honourably championed – would have had to
pay. Not for peace, because peace was never on the agenda; but for the utter
foolishness of those who thought they could stay out of the most important
moral struggle in human history.
And therein lies the clinching argument. Staying out of the
war fails not only on the hard-headed grounds of preserving New Zealand’s
strategic and economic interests; and not just on the soft-hearted grounds of
duty and loyalty to the nation that had given New Zealand birth; but,
ultimately, on the grounds of the damage it would have inflicted on New
Zealand’s soul – for want of a better word.
No possible outcome of the war could have left us unsullied
in the eyes of the civilised world. Had Britain accepted Hitler’s generous
surrender terms in 1940, we would have fallen under the sway of the very worst
elements in British – and New Zealand – society. Why? Because a British Empire
in thrall to Nazi Germany would have been a fascist empire. And, if Britain had
won the war without us? What would we be then? Certainly not the widely respected
“social laboratory of the world” whose Prime Minister spoke up successfully for
the rights of small nations at the San Francisco Conference which gave birth to
the United Nations. No, New Zealand would have found itself lumped in with the
likes of Eamon De Valera’s Ireland, and Juan Peron’s Argentina: countries
not-so-secretly regretful that Hitler had been defeated.
How would Stevan Eldred-Grigg feel, I wonder, writing the
history of a nation like that?
This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Tuesday, 3 September 2019.
