The Pacific War Council

On 1 April 1942 the first meeting of the Pacific War Council was held at the White House in Washington. It was chaired by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and around the table sat his closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, and representatives of the countries at war with Japan: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, China and Canada. The council was meant to give the smaller allies a voice in the conduct of the war in the Pacific. It is often said that its purpose was soon overtaken by events, “especially the collapse of the ABDA command”. The order of events was in fact the reverse: the ABDA command had been dissolved on 25 February, more than five weeks before the first meeting, and the council in its Washington form was created precisely in response to that defeat and to the demands of allies who felt left out.

Allies without a seat at the table

At the Arcadia Conference at the turn of 1941 and 1942, Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill created two new bodies. The first was the Allied ABDA command under General Archibald Wavell, which was to defend the area from Burma to Australia. The second was the Combined Chiefs of Staff, composed solely of the most senior British and American commanders and sitting in Washington. From February the American side was represented in it by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, whose territories were directly threatened, had no place in this system at all. Their forces came under the ABDA command, but the direction of the war was decided by men whom they could approach only through London or through their diplomats in Washington.

The loudest protests came from the Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin, who as early as the end of December 1941 had announced that his country was looking to America. He was supported by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Peter Fraser. Both governments wanted an inter-governmental council responsible for directing the war in the Pacific and meeting in Washington, because that was where the American ships, aircraft and money were. Churchill preferred to preserve London’s influence. On 9 February 1942 a Far Eastern Council, also known as the London Pacific War Council, was set up in the British capital. Chaired by Churchill or the Dominions Secretary, it included representatives of Australia – among them the former prime minister Earle Page – as well as of New Zealand, the Netherlands and India. This body, however, was purely advisory. Roosevelt proposed that representatives of the smaller countries might attend meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff when matters concerning their countries were discussed, and the Americans undertook to work closely with their military missions. Canberra and Wellington accepted this arrangement under protest.

Defeat and a new division

The events of the following weeks swept the existing arrangement away. On 15 February Singapore surrendered; on 25 February Wavell flew to India and the ABDA command ceased to exist; and at the beginning of March Java fell. In March Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on a division of responsibility for the theatres of war: the Pacific went to the United States, the Indian Ocean and the Middle East to Britain, while Europe and the Atlantic remained a joint responsibility. One American staff memorandum of the time already raised the idea of moving the advisory Pacific council from London to Washington. Meanwhile General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia, and Curtin at once nominated him as supreme commander of the Allied forces in the region.

On 30 March 1942 the Pacific War Council was formally established in Washington. That same day the American chiefs of staff approved the division of the Pacific into two commands: the South West Pacific Area under MacArthur, covering Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and most of the Dutch East Indies, and the Pacific Ocean Areas under Admiral Chester Nimitz. For the allies the signal was unmistakable: the war against Japan would be run by the Americans.

The first meeting

Those who came to the White House on 1 April were diplomats accredited in Washington and politicians who happened to be in the capital. Britain was represented by the ambassador, Edward Wood, Lord Halifax; China by its foreign minister, Song Ziwen (known in the West as T. V. Soong), brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek, who since 1940 had been arranging credits and supplies for China in America. The Netherlands was represented by its minister, Alexander Loudon; New Zealand by Walter Nash, the finance minister, sent to Washington as his country’s first minister there; and Canada by its legation, headed by the minister Leighton McCarthy. In April Australia was represented by its Minister for External Affairs, Herbert Vere Evatt, who had come to the United States that spring to press for aircraft and reinforcements for his country. A photograph of the April meeting, held by the Australian War Memorial, shows Evatt and the Canadian diplomat Hume Wrong alongside Roosevelt, Hopkins, Halifax, Soong, Nash and Loudon.

According to an editorial note in the American collection of diplomatic documents, the council was a “consultative body” for considering political questions connected with the war against Japan. In practice the meetings served above all to let the President inform the allies about the course of the war and set out his views on the conduct of operations. In the first months the council met almost every week. The representatives of the smaller countries could ask, request and protest, but they had no authority over any forces. All matters requiring a decision went to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and those concerning the Pacific increasingly to the Americans alone. Since the United States supplied most of the ships, aircraft and supplies, it was the United States that in practice set strategy in the Pacific, even though in mid-1942 it still had relatively few troops there.

A voice without power

The council’s limitations were apparent from the first weeks. Curtin and Evatt continued to press for more forces for Australia, and at the end of April Curtin, citing MacArthur’s opinion, proposed to Churchill that two British divisions earmarked for India be sent to Australia. Churchill rejected the idea and passed the proposal on to Roosevelt, asking whether the President or his Pacific War Council had considered it. Washington took the view that requests from the commander in the Pacific should go to the American War Department, not to the prime ministers of allied countries. The council thus remained a place for exchanging information, not for directing the war.

Even so, its significance was not nil. For Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands it was proof that America treated them as partners and not merely as bases and battlefields. For China, which had been fighting Japan alone since 1937, it was one of the few places where its representative sat at the same table as the President of the United States and the British ambassador. Roosevelt, for his part, could hear all the grievances in a single room and argue that the “Germany first” strategy did not mean abandoning the Pacific.

Place in the war

Over time the council’s membership grew. In May 1942 the President of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, arrived in Washington and took a seat on the council, and later a representative of British India joined as well. On 25 June 1942, at the twelfth meeting, Churchill and the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, also sat at the table. Roosevelt spoke with satisfaction of the Japanese carrier losses after the Battle of Midway, and Churchill expressed the “unspeakable relief” with which the British had received the news from the Pacific. Meetings such as this, attended by leaders visiting Washington, showed what the council had become in practice: a place where the leading powers of the coalition informed the smaller allies of decisions already taken.

In time the meetings grew less frequent. The last one for which minutes survive was the thirty-sixth, held on 12 January 1944, a few weeks after the conferences in Cairo and Tehran, at which the future of the war against Japan was discussed by the leaders of the great powers alone. Yet the experience of 1942, when the fate of Australia, New Zealand and the Dutch East Indies was decided without them, was not wasted. Evatt, who had sat at the table in the White House in April 1942, became at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 one of the most vocal defenders of the rights of smaller states in the emerging United Nations, and after the war Australia and New Zealand consistently sought their security in an alliance with the United States.