India, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland at war

On 3 September 1939, within hours of Great Britain declaring war on Germany, a vast part of the world found itself at war. The Viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow, announced that India too was at war, although he had not consulted a single one of the politicians Indians had elected. The Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, declared on the radio that since Great Britain had declared war, “as a result, Australia is also at war”. The New Zealand government adopted the war as its own decision and backdated it so that it began at the same minute as Britain’s. Newfoundland, a dominion then governed by a commission appointed in London, could not even decide anything: the British declaration covered it automatically. These four ways of going to war show how varied were the ties that bound London to its empire in 1939.

The empire after the Statute of Westminster

In August 1914 matters had been simple. The King declared war, and with him the whole British Empire: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, Newfoundland and India were not asked about anything. The war effort of the dominions had been so great, however, that after the war they demanded equal status. The Imperial Conference of 1926 recognised them as autonomous communities, “equal in status” and in no way subordinate to one another, and the Statute of Westminster of December 1931 gave this principle the force of law: the British parliament could no longer legislate for a dominion without its consent.

The Statute did not work the same way everywhere. Canada, the Union of South Africa and the Irish Free State applied it at once. Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland were to adopt it only by acts of their own, and by 1939 none of them had done so. That is why in September 1939 Canada could wait a week for a vote in its own parliament, South Africa could go through a government crisis and Ireland could declare neutrality, while Australia and Newfoundland held that the British declaration of war bound them by law. India, for its part, was not a dominion at all but a possession of the Crown, governed by a viceroy answerable to the government in London.

India: war declared by the Viceroy

Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, had been Viceroy since April 1936. Earlier he had chaired the parliamentary committee that prepared the Government of India Act of 1935, and as Viceroy he was putting it into effect. The Act gave Indians self-government in the provinces: after the elections of 1937 the Indian National Congress formed governments in most of the eleven provinces of British India, and by 1939 it was running eight of them. At the centre a federation of the provinces and the princely states was to be created, but the princes were unwilling to join it and it had not been set up by the time war broke out. Defence, foreign policy and the decision on war remained in the Viceroy’s hands.

Tension was building even before September. In August 1939 the authorities sent Indian Army brigades to Egypt and Malaya without consulting Indian politicians, and in protest Congress called on its members to boycott the next session of the central Legislative Assembly. On 3 September Linlithgow, using his powers, proclaimed a state of emergency and announced that India was at war with Germany. He also issued the Defence of India Ordinance, which gave the authorities wide emergency powers. In legal terms he acted correctly, since the decision on war lay with the Crown. Politically, however, it was a mistake that Indians remembered for many years: the participation of more than 300 million people in the war had been decided by a single British aristocrat, without a word to the leaders of the parties that had won the elections two years earlier.

The next day, 4 September, the Viceroy received Mahatma Gandhi at Simla, the summer capital of British India. Gandhi told him that his sympathies lay with Great Britain and France, and in a statement published afterwards admitted that he had been moved to tears at the thought of the possible destruction of London and Westminster Abbey. He stressed, however, that he was speaking for himself and could not commit Congress. The Congress leaders, among them Jawaharlal Nehru, who had just broken off a journey to China, condemned Nazism and Fascism, but did not want a country fighting for its freedom to fight for freedom in Europe while itself remaining a colony.

The federation postponed and the Congress ministries resign

On 11 September Linlithgow addressed both chambers of the central legislature, the Council of State and the Legislative Assembly. He announced that work on establishing the federation provided for by the Act of 1935 would be suspended for the duration of the war, although its creation remained the aim of the British government. For Congress this meant that the only reform promised at the centre was disappearing from the agenda, and that decisions on the war would be taken without Indians.

The Congress Working Committee replied on 14 September with a resolution drafted by Nehru. Congress condemned German aggression but asked Great Britain what its war aims were: was it fighting for democracy and the right of nations to self-determination, and if so, did that include India? A free India, the resolution declared, would gladly join in the defence of democracy. The Viceroy’s reply of 17 October was a disappointment: dominion status remained a distant goal, and constitutional changes were promised consideration only after the war, in consultation with the various groups. For the time being Linlithgow offered no more than a consultative body. On 22 October the Working Committee called on the Congress ministries to resign. The provincial governments stepped down between the end of October and mid-November 1939, and British governors took over power in those provinces.

The Muslim League behaved differently. Its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, declared his willingness to cooperate with the authorities, though he demanded guarantees for Muslims in return, and on 22 December 1939 his party celebrated the departure of the Congress ministries as a “Day of Deliverance”. Instead of uniting India, the war deepened the rift between Congress and the League that eight years later led to the partition of the country. A former president of Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, went his own way, believing that Britain’s war was India’s chance to win its independence.

Australia: “as a result, Australia is also at war”

Robert Menzies had been prime minister for less than five months. He had taken office in April 1939 after the death of Joseph Lyons and headed a minority government of the United Australia Party, because the leader of the Country Party, Earle Page, had refused to join his cabinet. Menzies had long supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and as late as the summer of 1939 believed that the Danzig crisis could be resolved peacefully. What he feared most was Japan: a war in Europe might keep the British fleet in home waters, and Australia’s entire defence strategy rested on the promise that the fleet would sail to Singapore if Japan threatened. Even so, Menzies had no doubt that if Great Britain went to war, Australia would go with it.

The British ultimatum expired at 11 a.m. London time, which was 8 p.m. in eastern Australia. At 9.15 p.m. Menzies spoke on every national and commercial radio station in the country: “Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.” He traced the road to war from the attack on Poland, recalled the seizure of Czechoslovakia and the pact with the USSR that Hitler had concluded “without a blush”, and argued that no empire could rest for long on broken promises. The Governor-General, Lord Gowrie (Alexander Hore-Ruthven), issued a proclamation that a state of war existed.

The words “as a result” summed up Menzies’s view of constitutional law: the Crown was indivisible, so the King’s war was the war of all his subjects. Australia made no separate declaration of war. When in 1942 the Australian parliament finally adopted the Statute of Westminster, it made it retrospective to 3 September 1939. All parties supported the war. The leader of the opposition Labor Party, John Curtin, assured the government of his support for the defence of the country, and the war cabinet included, among others, the former prime minister Billy Hughes. Parliament swiftly passed the National Security Act, and on 15 September Menzies announced the formation of the volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force, the first formation of which, the 6th Division, was to number some 20,000 men. The ships of the Australian navy were placed at the disposal of the Admiralty.

New Zealand: “Where she goes, we go”

New Zealand’s Labour government differed from Menzies in its judgement of the past. In the 1930s New Zealand had criticised appeasement and advocated collective security through the League of Nations. When London abandoned appeasement and guaranteed Poland’s independence, Wellington backed it without reservation. The Prime Minister, Michael Savage, the architect of New Zealand’s welfare state, was by then terminally ill with cancer, so in the days when war broke out the government was led by his deputy, Peter Fraser.

On the evening of 3 September Fraser and other ministers listened in the parliament building to Chamberlain’s broadcast on short wave. Interference left them uncertain exactly what the British prime minister had said, and the cipher telegram from London did not arrive until shortly before midnight. The government took its decision after intercepting an Admiralty signal informing the fleet that war had begun. The next day the cabinet approved several dozen war regulations prepared in advance, and the Governor-General, Lord Galway, signed a proclamation of war with a retrospective date: the state of war ran from 9.30 p.m. on 3 September New Zealand time, that is, from the precise moment the British ultimatum expired. Unlike Australia, then, New Zealand issued its own act, but it took care neither to anticipate nor to lag behind Great Britain by so much as a minute.

On 5 September the radio broadcast a speech by Savage, drafted largely, according to New Zealand historians, by the government’s legal adviser Henry Cornish and delivered by the prime minister from his sickbed. Its most famous sentence ran: “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.” These words became the motto of New Zealand’s war effort. Savage died on 27 March 1940 and Fraser became prime minister. As early as August 1939 New Zealand had handed over to Great Britain 30 Vickers Wellington bombers ordered for its own air force, together with their crews. They became the nucleus of No. 75 Squadron RAF, the first dominion squadron in the British air force.

Newfoundland: a dominion without a parliament

The Dominion of Newfoundland was a peculiar case in 1939. Formally it had the same status as Canada or Australia, but the Great Depression had bankrupted it: debts incurred during the First World War and the collapse of fish prices meant that by 1933 there was nothing left to service its obligations. The parliament in St John’s itself voted to suspend self-government, and from 16 February 1934 the island was ruled by a Commission of Government: the governor and six commissioners, three British and three Newfoundlanders, answerable to the government in London. In practice Newfoundland had reverted to the status of a colony.

Since there was no parliament to decide anything, the British declaration of war on 3 September covered Newfoundland automatically, just as in 1914. The Commission brought into force the Newfoundland Defence Act, which took effect on 1 September, and in September decided to form a local militia to guard the docks, fuel tanks and radio stations in St John’s. The island then had about 300,000 inhabitants. According to the Canadian War Museum, more than 12,000 Newfoundlanders served in the armed forces and auxiliary formations during the war: in the Royal Navy, in two Newfoundland regiments of British artillery, in the air force and in the Newfoundland Forestry Unit, formed at London’s request in the autumn of 1939 to cut timber in Great Britain.

Place in the war

Entering the war on 3 September meant that from the first day Great Britain did not fight alone. Behind it stood the resources of the whole empire, which over the following years would prove invaluable. The Indian Army, some 200,000 strong in 1939, grew to more than 2.5 million men and became the largest volunteer army in history. It fought in North Africa, in Italy and above all in Burma. Australians and New Zealanders fought in North Africa, Greece and Crete, and from 1942 the Australians above all in New Guinea. The New Zealand cruiser HMS Achilles took part in the Battle of the River Plate in December 1939. Airmen from the dominions trained under the joint air training scheme agreed in December 1939. Newfoundland, with the airfield at Gander and its naval bases, became an important link in the Battle of the Atlantic, and under the Anglo-American agreement of 1940 known as “destroyers for bases”, American bases were built there from 1941.

The political consequences of that day reached far beyond 1945. In India the resignation of the Congress ministries opened the way to the “Quit India” movement of 1942, mass arrests, the rise of the Muslim League and, ultimately, independence and the partition of the country in 1947. Australia, which in 1939 had gone to war “as a result” of London’s decision, turned towards the United States after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and adopted the Statute of Westminster. New Zealand did so in 1947. Newfoundland, to which the war brought prosperity thanks to the building of the bases, voted by a narrow majority in two referendums in 1948 to join Canada, and on 31 March 1949 became its tenth province.