What was Australia doing in Vietnam?

In July 1967 President Lyndon B Johnson sent two of his principal advisers, Clark Clifford and Gen Maxwell Taylor, to Australia and New Zealand with an urgent mission. Protests were raging in American streets and on university campuses. Hawks and doves were battling in Washington. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara was heading toward resignation, an admission that his Vietnam policy had failed.

Amid this turmoil, Gen William C Westmoreland was demanding a substantial escalation in American troop numbers, around 400,000 at the start of the year. To get any increase out of an increasingly critical Congress, Johnson had to show that American allies, especially democracies like Australia and New Zealand that were paying their own way, were prepared to increase their commitments. As Clifford told the New Zealand government, “one additional New Zealand soldier might produce 50 Americans.”

The prospects for the Clifford-Taylor mission looked good in Australia, where the conservative government had been outspokenly hawkish. When American officials first indicated, in December 1964, that the administration was considering sending combat forces to Vietnam and that an Australian contribution would be welcome, they seemed to have in mind a modest increase to the advisory team of 83 soldiers already in South Vietnam. Instead, Robert Menzies, Australia’s long-serving prime minister, sent a battalion of 800 troops, even though their role, like American strategy in general, was far from clear.

As Menzies saw it, the risk in American policy was not strategic overreach but isolationism, and what an American withdrawal from Asia in the face of defeat would mean for Australia and its neighbours. As a young man of military age during World War I, and as a youthful prime minister at the outbreak of World War II, he knew how painful it was for Britain and its dominions to be at war without America. The crucial step, it seemed, was to ensure American commitment: Once that was achieved, victory would be certain. Australia’s “forward defence” strategy after 1945 was to make small, but effective, military commitments in order to keep both Britain and the United States, which Menzies called “our great and powerful friends,” committed to Southeast Asia.

Australians had good reason to believe in the domino theory. Since 1945 Southeast Asia had been a caldron of conflicts created by the complex combination of decolonisation, the Cold War and longstanding local rivalries. By 1964 the region seemed to be at a tipping point. Malaysia was facing a confrontation with Indonesia, where the world’s third-largest Communist party was exerting increasing influence. Although not a Communist, Indonesia’s President Sukarno had received arms from the Soviet Union and boasted of his close ideological ties with China, North Korea and North Vietnam.

Tensions between the Malay-dominated government in Kuala Lumpur and the ethnic Chinese city-state of Singapore would lead to the ejection of Singapore from Malaysia in August 1965. The Thais and Filipinos had their own domestic insurgencies, as well as highly unstable neighbours.

In this volatile environment, many Australians considered a fairly small military commitment, combined with strong political and diplomatic support for the United States, a small premium to pay for Australia’s strategic insurance policy, the Australia-New Zealand-United States treaty.

In 1966 Menzies’s successor, Harold Holt, had added a second battalion to the Australian commitment, declared on the White House lawn that Australia was “all the way with L.B.J.,” hosted a triumphal tour by the first incumbent president to visit Australia, and won a huge electoral victory on his Vietnam policy. In early 1967, he added further units, making Australia the only “third country” to provide army, navy and air force assets.

By the time Clifford and Taylor met Holt’s cabinet in July, however, the mood had changed. The Australian antiwar movement was gathering momentum, inspired partly by casualties among young conscripts. A controversial form of selective conscription was sending 20-year-old men, too young to vote, to fight in Vietnam. This system had been introduced with Indonesia in mind more than Indochina, but by 1967 the regional situation had entirely changed.

© 2017 The New York Times News Service