FORGOTTEN TRIUMPH.

• Author: McIntyre, W. David
• Position: ANZUS Pact

W. David McIntyre recalls New Zealand's establishment of a now lost special relationship with the United States half a century ago.

The fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS Pact falls on 1 September 2001. In 1951 the `Security Treaty between the United States, New Zealand and Australia' was signed in San Francisco as part of a package of treaties relating to the peace of the Pacific. Also included were the US-Philippines Mutual Security Treaty (30 August), the Japanese Peace Treaty (8 September) and the US-Japan Security Treaty (8 September). As the Holland government was too miserly to send a Cabinet minister to represent New Zealand, Sir Carl Berendsen, the Ambassador in Washington, performed the signing. Malcolm Templeton, who was travelling to take up the post of Third Secretary in the Embassy, and who is now probably the sole living participant from these events, assisted him. At the end of a week during which Berendsen had been on television five times, made five radio broadcasts (some on these on coast-to-coast hook ups), and received front page newspaper coverage, he said New Zealand's role `has brought us a popularity which is as surprising and embarrassing as ... it is pleasant'.

Fifty years on it is, perhaps, hard to recapture the sense of achievement induced by these events in San Francisco. The final decade of the twentieth century was crowded with half-centennial and jubilee remembrances. Parades and ceremonies have marked key battles of the Second World War, the ending of the war in Europe and the Pacific, the founding of the United Nations, battles of the Korean War -- and these show no sign of abating. True to a long tradition of patriotic celebration of military disasters, Prime Minister Helen Clark has visited Gallipoli and Crete. The events of September 1951 may not be remembered in this way, but it is worth sparing a thought for a notable triumph on the route to independent nationhood.

The ANZUS Treaty, which, according to the text, `shall remain in force indefinitely', arose from four different contexts. Firstly, it was a formal recognition that New Zealand and Australia relied on the United States for their ultimate security in time of war. As early as the fall of France in 1940, when the British navy was left facing the German and Italian navies without the help of the French navy, the British government informed the Dominion governments that, if war broke out in the Pacific, the chance of sending adequate reinforcements was `most improbable'. It announced that: `We should therefore have to rely on the United States of America to safeguard our interests there'. In the Pacific War, Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand forces played a part, but the defeat of Japan depended on overwhelming US superiority. In the immediate post-war years, the United States envisaged a global chain of bases to maintain a world-side policing capacity. A number of Pacific Islands under Australian, British or New Zealand jurisdiction were included in the list. This prompted the Australian government to suggest that they should be used as bargaining counters to secure a joint mutual security agreement -- a possible `Britanzus Treaty'. But the Americans were unwilling to make commitments.

Peaceful area

The Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington never wanted to be tied down. They were only interested in facilities on a care and maintenance basis, and they soon lost interest in the South Pacific (then one of the most peaceful areas of the world), preferring to concentrate their bases in Japan, the Philippines and the strategic trust territory in Micronesia. In New Zealand, however, the quest for an American guarantee continued. As defence planners considered strategic goals and the shape of the peacetime armed forces in the early years of the Cold War, diplomat Frank Corner wrote in July 1948: `It is not fanciful to suggest that the grand aim of New Zealand external policy and diplomacy might be to secure in some form an American guarantee of the security of New Zealand'. After the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 and the creation of NATO, Prime Minister Peter Fraser looked to the possibility of an equivalent Pacific Pact. To the generation that had experienced wartime Allied co-operation such arrangements in the Cold War seemed natural.

The second context that led to ANZUS was the Middle East commitment. In the immediate post-war years the Soviet Union sought a defensive buffer of satellite states on its western and eastern flanks, but was at its most vulnerable on the southern flank. The British and American Chiefs of Staff, for their part, and...