Just how much responsibility Menzies should shoulder for Australia’s vulnerability has long been a matter of considerable historical debate, one in which I have been a participant, with my books Menzies and Churchill at War (1986) and The Great Betrayal (1988). The debate has now been joined by Henderson, who aims to rebut the evidence that I and others, such as Judith Brett, Stuart Macintyre, Cameron Hazlehurst, and David Horner, have brought to public attention.

In essence, it has been argued that the interwar defence policies of the Lyons and Menzies governments caused Australia to place undue emphasis on naval forces, which was done out of deference to Britain’s defence priorities so that Australian ships could serve as part of a British fleet. On the outbreak of war, much of the Australian army was also deployed overseas, from the Middle East to Singapore. And it was all done on the assurance that Britain would spring to Australia’s defence in the event of a Pacific war.

As prime minister, Menzies began to suspect that the war against Germany would prevent Britain from coming to Australia’s aid in the event of a war with Japan. He was of course correct. But what was he to do? It was too late to conjure up a well-equipped Australian army and air force. And the forces that Menzies sent overseas could not be recalled without upsetting relations with London. It is Henderson’s contention that Menzies made a desperate attempt to obtain a commitment of British munitions and forces when he embarked on a four-month visit to Britain in January 1941.

Winston Churchill (centre), chancellor of the University of Bristol, confers an honorary degree on Robert Menzies (left), 12 April 1941

That was certainly among Menzies’ priorities when he left Australia, but after he arrived in London it was overtaken by the greater priority: trying to save the British Empire from the leadership of Winston Churchill, who Menzies privately described as a ‘menace’. Menzies found that he was not alone in harbouring fears about Churchill, and he was led to believe that he could play a role in curbing Churchill’s almost dictatorial control. The failure of Churchill’s cabinet colleagues and military advisers to resist his wilder military moves, such as the ill-fated 1941 Greek campaign, convinced Menzies to remain longer in London and to try to return there after arriving back in Australia. Rejected by his own colleagues, Menzies wanted to carve out a political career in London and perhaps even be in a position to replace Churchill.

It has long been of embarrassment to the Liberal Party that their founder was a less than forthright war leader compared with John Curtin (1941–45). Henderson is clearly anxious to address that embarrassment, but the cracks in Menzies’ war record are too wide to be papered over by what is essentially a poorly based polemic rather than a solid work of history. This is clear when she wheels out Lord Carrington to disparage the thesis that I developed in Menzies and Churchill at War, and which was described by Lord Blake, the official historian of the Conservative Party, as ‘an important contribution to the historiography of the Second World War’.

Henderson wants her readers to believe otherwise, and pushes Carrington into the spotlight as a supposedly credible witness for the contrary view. To establish his credibility, she claims that he ‘took his seat in the House of Lords in 1939’ and ‘knew Menzies – and Churchill – well’. Carrington actually took his seat in the House of Lords in 1940, when he turned twenty-one, but didn’t spend the war in the House of Lords. Instead, he went off to fight as a junior officer in the Grenadier Guards. Henderson can’t show that he was a witness to anything in wartime Westminster, and he only came to know Menzies and Churchill in the 1950s.

Apart from Carrington, the author also claims that Menzies’ official biographer, the late Allan Martin, ‘verified through exhaustive research [that there was] no evidence for the thesis’ that Menzies was interested in toppling Churchill. In fact, the supposedly ‘exhaustive research’ by Martin consisted of examining just a selection of official records in Britain’s Public Record Office and only two collections of private papers in the Churchill Archives, whereas my book was based on an examination of twenty-nine different collections of private papers in ten different British archives.

That is the problem with this disappointing book, which claims to be a serious historical work that punctures the supposed myths about Menzies. The book is all about rehabilitating Menzies’ reputation by depicting him as a nationalist-minded leader who had Australia’s security and interests, rather than his own advancement or the defence of the British Empire, uppermost on his agenda.

It is not surprising to find that the production of the book was partly financed by a Liberal Party fund. It also has endorsements on the back cover from Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, and Josh Frydenberg, while Geoffrey Blainey is quoted on the front cover describing it as ‘an eye-opening book’.

The book is couched in the language of the so-called ‘history wars’ of the 1990s, when John Howard and Paul Keating went head-to-head on our past and extolled the nationalist credentials of their particular political parties. But its tone reaches even further back to the 1950s and 1960s, when left-wing conspirators supposedly lurked around every corner and hid under every bed. Henderson sees conspiracies as the cause of Menzies’ wartime leadership being marked down, and is determined to redress it by producing a book that argues to a predetermined conclusion for present-day political purposes.

Menzies’ first prime ministership was not his finest hour, and this book cannot be counted as Henderson’s finest work. Rather than going where the historical evidence takes her, Henderson seems to have decided to go where current political imperatives demand. Menzies at War reads in places more like a fevered opinion piece in the Murdoch press. The author has produced a book that is less a serious work of history and more of a political artefact.