by Max Solling, March 2026
This morning I’d like to share thoughts about the Second World War, a truly global conflict in which at least 60 million people died and which left the international order irrevocably changed. War would reach deeply into national life, as mobilisation drove the Australian economy to increase output by 40 per cent over pre-war levels.
For the first two years after the declaration of war in 1939, Australia fought a distant war that permitted a dilatory mobilisation of resources. That changed with the outbreak of the Pacific War on 7 December 1941, when Pearl Harbour was bombed. Suddenly, war began to impinge on the Australian consciousness. Prime Minister Curtin told the nation that the days ahead would impose a supreme test, ranging from resisting invasion to enduring the deprivation of amenities. The government laced everything with a war footing.
Four weeks after Pearl Harbour, Japan invaded the port of Rabaul, New Guinea. The enemy was too close for comfort. At that time, the vast majority of Australia’s four volunteer infantry divisions were fighting thousands of miles away in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and our navy and air force were also engaged in the conflict. On 15 February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese, forever destroying the idea of British naval superiority in the Asia-Pacific, evidence that the sun was setting on the British Empire. Four days later, Japanese aeroplanes bombed Darwin, destroying 30 aircraft and sinking eleven ships, with the loss of 246 lives.
In the country’s north, First Nations Australians were recruited and served with distinction in land, sea and air forces. More than 4,000 Indigenous men served in the armed forces, yet the Anzac Portal tells us that their service was slow to receive recognition.
In less than two months, Curtin was confronted with 22,000 Australian soldiers becoming prisoners of war after being captured defending Singapore, Greece and Crete. Most of Australia’s 26,000 airmen who served with the RAF had enlisted and trained under the Empire Air Training Scheme. Our airmen fought in all the British campaigns against Germany, sustaining heavy losses in the bombing offensive. The 10,000 aircrew who died, mostly in Europe, emphasised the lethal nature of the war in the skies.
An alliance shift
In January 1942, before the fall of Singapore, the Australian government warned Churchill that failure to defend the fortress would be regarded as an ‘inexcusable betrayal’. Curtin insisted that Australian troops in North Africa be returned to defend Australia rather than join the defence of Burma. He also appealed directly to the United States for support.
Four weeks after the fall of Singapore, General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in the south-west Pacific. The theatrical American proposed a division of labour: ‘You take care of the rear,’ he told Curtin, ‘and I will handle the front’ – Australia’s north. The two men established a good rapport, but Australia inevitably occupied a subordinate position in the Alliance. More than one million US troops would pass through Australia during the Pacific War, with collective community memories of troop trains rumbling along the goods line that runs under Glebe, and the US Army setting up camp in Wentworth Park.
Two epic battles – the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 and the Battle of Midway a month later – meant Japan could not invade Papua by sea. A large Japanese force instead landed on the north coast of Papua, intending to cross the Owen Stanley Range to capture the capital, Port Moresby. Australian infantry with Papuan support engaged in intense and bloody fighting amid malarial swamps and inhospitable jungle along the Kokoda Track. They launched a counterattack to repel the Japanese advance and, on 2 November 1942, retook Kokoda. This was instantly memorialised as one of the defining moments of the Pacific War in the films and photographs of Australian war photographer and cameraman, Damien Parer. Twelve thousand Japanese died along the track, along with 2,000 Australians and 500 Papuans.
Allied victories in Papua, coupled with the Americans’ prevailing at Guadalcanal in February 1943, signalled a decisive shift in the Pacific War. Just as Gallipoli colonised the popular memory of the First World War, Kokoda – though only one crucial battle among many – became one of the best-known stories of the Pacific War.
Glebe and the Second World War
Back in Australia, house construction had been at a standstill since the Depression of the 1930s. Much inner-city housing was in disrepair and lacked basic facilities, contributing to a general deterioration in living conditions, especially for large families surviving on single incomes. Memories of the sacrifice of the First World War remained vivid, along with a strong belief that the burden now faced must be shared fairly across the community. Glebe was a predominantly tenanted part of heavily industrialised inner Sydney with 164 factories employing 4,496 people. Its local council proudly maintained to the ritual of Anzac Day on Saturday afternoons, enhanced by Glebe Public School’s large procession. Alexandria, with 358 factories and 22,238 employees in 1945, was the second‑largest industrial centre in the City of Sydney.
John Curtin, himself an austere and self-doubting man, demanded much of the Australian people, telling them, ‘The enemy thunders at our gates and your every waking hour must be an hour devoted to Australia.’ A masterly parliamentarian and Australia’s Prime Minister from 1941 to 1945, Curtin inspired others by example and commitment, unifying the nation which rose to the occasion with an unprecedented level of mobilisation: one million Australians enlisted – three times as many as the First World War – and 560,000 served overseas. Thirty-seven thousand Australians died. The government undertook far-reaching reforms that laid the foundations for a new post-war economic and social order. Curtin died on 5 July 1945 and did not see the final victory.
Some 2,426 Glebe men and 79 Glebe women responded to the call to arms, lining up at drill halls and recreational centres to enlist. Of these, 81.5% served in the AIF and 16.2 % in the RAAF. A 1944 poll asked Australians what kind of war memorial they favoured. A remarkable 90% voted for useful memorials; only 4% voted for ‘memorials, cenotaphs or shrines’. Monumentality was out of fashion, and as a result, the names of local people who died in the war are largely absent from Glebe’s landscape.
In 1947, Glebe’s 20,510 residents were overwhelmingly Australian-born, and manufacturing was the major source of employment for its male workforce. Only 28% of Glebe’s women were in paid employment; the remaining 72% undertook unpaid work and managed family budgets, demonstrating frugality and ingenuity in making ends meet. The domestic skills and informal networks of local women in unpaid work were crucial components of working-class strength.
Postwar reconstruction
H.C. Coombs, Director-General of postwar reconstruction from 1943, was troubled by the suffering he witnessed in England during the Depression and drew on his Keynesian ideals to chart Australia’s course into the postwar period. Working with his minister, Ben Chifley, and an idealistic team of young civil servants, Coombs developed plans for full employment and a more satisfying life after the war. Hammered by the Depression and overstretched by the war, Australians were poised to experience an important shift in the social compact. Curtin told parliament that ‘there will have to be a fairer distribution of wealth’ and new Prime Minister Chifley displayed a steely determination that there would be no return to hardship and humiliation.
Chifley’s 1946 claim that ‘Australia was entering a golden age’ was vindicated by statistics: the third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of unmatched growth; the population almost doubled, the economy tripled in size, and there were jobs for all who wanted them. Workers expended less effort to earn a living, had more money for discretionary spending, and enjoyed increased leisure.
Glebe’s Stan Arneil: One Man’s War
Late in 1945, Australia witnessed the return of 14,000 surviving prisoners of war. In time, they came to embody anew the diggers’ legendary qualities of mateship, resourcefulness, laconic humour and survival against impossible odds. A diverse range of prisoner-of-war memoirs soon attracted publishers. Fighting as prisoners of war demanded a different kind of valour from that associated with active combat. Outstanding memoirs by ‘Weary’ Dunlop, Ray Parkin and Adrian Curlewis were joined by the journal of a young Glebe rower, Stan Arneil – one of the majority of POWs (22,000) held by the Japanese, of whom one‑third (8,200) died in captivity, a chilling statistic. Japanese camp prisoners endured unimaginable levels of starvation, disease and cruelty; once the will to live capitulated, the body soon followed. After years of incarceration, retaining one’s sanity and humanity in the struggle for self‑preservation was a profound challenge.
It was a tribute to Arneil that his prize-winning memoir One Man’s War topped the bestseller lists in 1982. Stan’s father, Tom, was a veteran of both the Boer War and the First World War. Stan received an education to an ‘intermediate standard’, secured his first job in a garage working 70 hours a week for 15 shillings, and in 1939, when his father died, borrowed money to pay for the funeral.
On 9 July 1940, Stan – six feet six inches tall and aged 21 – enlisted with rowing mates who had earlier sung together, ‘We are the boys of the GRC. We swim every day down in Blackwattle Bay, and we don’t give a cuss for the sharks.’ With the rank of Sergeant, he was among the Allied forces that surrendered unconditionally to the Japanese in Singapore on 15 February 1942. All troops were immediately taken prisoner. Arneil survived the spectre of hopelessness that stalked Changi prison camp, the horrors of relentless labour on the Burma-Thailand railway – with all its emotional resonance – and the agony of watching others die around him.
Stan Arneil kept a daily record of his time as a prisoner of war so others would know what this devout, spiritual man and his mates were enduring. But it was more than that; it became something inside him. Mirroring his thoughts was crucial to his very existence, a way of holding on so that he could return home, as he eventually did on 9 October 1945. Recording the facts became not so much an obsession as a lifeline, a link to home.
As the years rolled over their heads and the number of survivors dwindled, the journal grew even more important to Stan as a means of telling someone, sometime, what had unfolded daily during captivity. He recalled that compassion among fellow prisoners was outstanding: ‘You couldn’t go through a day or night without someone helping you, no one ever died alone, they were surrounded by love and prayer.’ It was, he wrote, ‘the greatest privilege of my life to have been part of that group’.
Stan married in 1947, a union that produced six children. He died at Collaroy on 19 April 1992, aged 73 years.
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