Australian High Commission, London, 25 February 1966
Secret
I have been asked by my Prime Minister to send you the following message:—
‘My dear Harold,
I was glad to have your message, through your High Commissioner, on 23rd February, about your defence review. Furthermore, it was helpful for us to have had an advance copy of the White Paper1 which, as you said, accords with the tentative conclusions which Mr. Healey put to us. I issued a short public statement yesterday about your White Paper in terms which I hope were helpful to you. Your High Commissioner will have sent you a copy. We were, as you would imagine, delighted that your Government has decided firmly to maintain a global role. I am sure that this is a sound, indeed historic, decision which you will never regret. Retreat from Asia would have had world-wide repercussions of a depressing kind for all devoted to the cause of freedom, and as some uncertainty had come to hang over the matter its removal will be heartening to all the non-Communist countries of Asia.
It may not have been an easy decision. The resignation of one of your Ministers2 and the line taken by Enoch Powell reveal that there are strong views in Great Britain which run in the other direction. We applaud the realism and firmness you have shown despite these dissenting judgements.
We strongly commend also your decision to remain in Singapore as long as acceptable conditions persist. As you know, we impressed as strongly as we could upon Denis Healey that your presence in Singapore and Malaysia is of the highest importance for the maintenance of peace and good order in the immediate areas, and is a moderating and stabilising influence for Asia generally. It leaves us, of course, in a much more effective military position than would be the case if operations had to be staged from bases further to the South. Your continuing presence will help to sustain morale, which would have suffered a grievous blow had your decision gone in the other direction.
It will interest you to know that, apart from the confirmation of these views which no doubt you have received both from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, the Thai Prime Minister and his colleagues Thanat Khoman and Pote Sarasin,3 in our talks with them in Canberra over the last two days, have fully endorsed our views about your presence on the mainland of Asia. They were emphatic that to remove from the mainland would be undesirable from the point of view of long-term stability in Asia.
Denis left us in no doubt as to the need for planning against the contingency that the Singapore base might prove untenable. We will work actively on this problem, knowing that our endeavours in this direction will be recognised by your Government, not as an incentive or encouragement to vacate Singapore, but to ensure that a withdrawal, if rendered unavoidable, will not result in a return home to the United Kingdom because of the absence of suitable facilities for operation on the mainland of Australia.
The visit last week of Hubert Humphrey,4 although not planned with any relationship to our talks with Denis Healey, was in the event most opportune. He made it plain that the United States also is strongly in favour of the retention of the Singapore base and of the continuance of substantial British forces East of Suez. He was receptive to what we had to say on the subject of quadripartite discussions.
I have just sent a message to President Johnson about the Vice President’s visit and have taken the occasion to raise again in a general way the importance which we attach to discussions at a political level, aimed at a political meeting of minds and deriving from that some broad joint understanding on our overall objectives in Asia and on defence strategy on the roles of forces and their dispositions and the better co-ordination both on our military and our economic aid policies.
It is likely that Paul Hasluck will be in London and Washington early in April and it may not be difficult to arrange the sort of exchange we have in mind at one or other of these centres.
Altogether the series of talks with Denis Healey, Vice President Humphrey and the Thai Delegation have greatly clarified our own thinking about the future defence programme. We shall be reaching a decision, I hope, next week on additional forces for Vietnam. I shall be in touch with you about this as soon as I can give you something more definite about our intentions.5 I recall that you told President Johnson last April when we committed a battalion to Vietnam, that you welcomed the decision as a valuable step toward our joint objectives. You can also expect us to remain in active discussion with you on such matters as the feasibility of base establishments and other questions arising from our valuable talks.
With kind regards,
Yours sincerely,
Harold Holt.’
1 On Southeast Asia, the UK White Paper commented (paragraph 24): ‘It is in the Far East and Southern Asia that the greatest danger to peace may lie in the next decade, and some of our partners in the Commonwealth may be greatly threatened. We believe it is right that Britain should continue to maintain a military presence in the area. Its effectiveness will turn largely on the arrangements we can make with our Commonwealth partners and other allies in the coming years. As soon as conditions permit, we shall make some reductions in the forces which we keep in the area. We have important military facilities in Malaysia and Singapore, as have our Australian and New Zealand partners. These we plan to retain for as long as the Governments of Malaysia and Singapore agree that we should do so on acceptable conditions. Against the day when it may no longer be possible for us to use these facilities freely, we have begun to discuss with the Government of Australia, the practical possibility of having military facilities in that country if necessary’ ( Statement on the Defence Estimates, 1966: Part I The Defence Review Cmnd 2901 (1966), p. 8).
2 A reference to the resignation of Christopher Mayhew (see Document 23, note 2).
3 Thai Foreign Minister, 1959–71, and Minister for National Development, 1963–68, respectively.
4 US Vice President, 1965–69.
5 In a letter again sent through Downer, Holt informed Wilson on 4 March that the Australian infantry battalion in Vietnam would be replaced at the end of its tour of duty in three months’ time by an enlarged task force of 4,500 men. This, according to Holt, had been ‘a major decision for us’. Taking account of Australia’s commitment in Malaysia and Singapore, it meant that the Army would be carried ‘to the upper limit of its capacity to contribute forces to this area in any situation short of an emergency’. Holt intended to impress this on President Johnson during his forthcoming US visit. The decision, he told Wilson, ‘would have been much more difficult for us to reach if we had not had the assurances which Denis Healey brought us, and which were subsequently contained in your defence review’ (UKNA: PREM 13/890).
[UKNA: PREM 13/890]