The internment of friendly enemy aliens

The Dunera Boys’ views of their own treatment separated very broadly into two camps which also had something of a geographic dimension. Some regarded their treatment – by a sadistic captain on board the Dunera and his not much better deputy – as a scandal and their incarceration as foolish xenophobia. Certainly they could be expected to be hostile to the Third Reich which had remorselessly demonised them to the point of rounding them up and removing them from Western Europe. The foolishness of it all was nicely captured in their delightfully oxymoronic classification as “Friendly enemy aliens”. This view of the Dunera saga was more typical of the Melbourne Dunera Boys.

The Sydney group – which my father would have identified himself though not in any self-conscious way – tended to see it all in a wider, more forgiving context. There was a war on and when their rounding up was announced (just before Churchill got to the “we will fight them on the beaches” peroration of his address to the House of Commons and the British people) in the wake of the evacuation of Dunkirk. It was a pretty tough and desperate time. And they weren’t too fond of playing the victim given their family ties to the real victims of the holocaust. They were indeed amazingly lucky in the circumstances.

In any event, I’ve just come across this piece by Dunera Boy Bern Brent of Canberra and thought I’d reproduce it here for the historical record as it were.

Dear Dunera News Readers,

As a Dunera Boy in Canberra I have attended Dunera reunions in Melbourne and Sydney irrregularly. But when I do, I am irritated by some sentiments that should not be allowed to become established unchallenged. One of them is the view that our internment was uncalled for, a disgrace, and a blot on British justice. Invariably Churchill is the chief villain of the piece.

Such sentiments ignore the historical setting of the time – May-June-July 1940. For Britain and France it had been a “Phoney War”. France was defeated decisively, very quickly, and so was the bulk of the British Army. Most of the British soldiers escaped at Dunkirk but they left all their equipment behind and the dismal defeat could not be denied.

The British press looked for a culprit. That the German army had shown itself to be superior – after all the Nazis had prepared for war for years – was not particularly palatable. The Fascists in Spain had won their war and had boasted about their “Fifth Column”. There had been four columns advancing on Madrid with a fifth column inside the city.

There were tens of thousands of Germans and Austrians in Britain, those who had received a B and C classification from tribunals at the beginning of the war. Most of them were Jewish refugees – many of them in the country for less than 18 months – but not all. There were political refugees. There were homosexuals. There were others who claimed to be sympathetic to the Allied cause. Some had lived in Britain for decades.

All these people were on the loose in a Britain suddenly threatened with invasion. It was not an empty threat. Had not the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe in the months to come – and it was a very close thing – it would have happened.

Chamberlain abdicated and Churchill became prime minister. Today Churchill is acknowledged as Britain’s saviour but Churchill’s hold on the prime ministership in May-June was precarious. The king had preferred Halifax, the Foreign Secretary.

In April, Germany had successfully invaded Norway. The Phoney War was well and truly over when Germany also invaded and occupied Holland, Denmark and Belgium and attacked France. After three days of desperate political manoeuvring and turmoil against the background of the military catastrophe, Churchill became P.M. It was then that he addressed Parliament: “I have nothing to offer but blood, tears and sweat”.

By the end of that month, May, Churchill had decided to intern not only Sir Oswald Mosley and 33 other fascists and fascist sympathisers, but also M. Ramsay, a Conservative M.P. since 1931, and not a member of the Fascist Party.

These people were not foreign nationals like us – some of them were members of the British establishment. It required real political courage to do what Churchill did.

The following month, the French surrendered and before the Dunera sailed, Churchill had seen to it that a major part of the French navy was destroyed in North Africa to prevent it falling into German hands. In a ten-minute attack by air and sea over 1000 French sailors lost their lives. Would the French Fleet have fallen into German hands? We will never know. But Churchill was not prepared to take any chances.

So, personally, I cannot get all upset about Churchill advocating, among all the many vital matters he had to face day by day, ‘intern the lot’. The intention had always been to sort us out in the fullness of time. Had I been in his shoes, I would have advocated the same. Who could be sure that Hitler had not sent a hundred determined agents to Britain in the guise of refugees, Jewish or otherwise?

Yes, the sorting out took too long and, yes, dispatching us to the Dominions was a mistake. But these were unusual times when everything was done on the gallop. There would have been no submissions to cabinet to be discussed and debated. No inter-departmental meetings to consider the issue. Senior officers would have had more important things to do and the actual execution of internment and transportation overseas would have been undertaken by relatively junior officers with lots of other matters to attend to.

When the Dunera was at sea, the Battle of Britain was in full swing. On 7 September, when we disembarked in Sydney Harbour, 300 German bombers accompanied by more than twice as many fighters appeared over London. German pilots reported the city a sea of flames. Many English people were bombed out, among them the chairman of the committee that had organised and financed the refugee hostel that looked after me as a sixteen and seventeen old boy. He and his family perished when a bomb hit their house.

I am a Churchill fan and this D.N. contribution will hopefully curtail the denigration that appears to be inevitable whenever his name crops up at Dunera reunions.