The Japanese attacks on British Malaya and Pearl Harbor occurred two months after Curtin became prime minister, and Australia entered the war against Japan.

He placed Australian forces under the command of the American general Douglas MacArthur, with whom he formed a close relationship, and successfully negotiated the issue of overseas conscription that had split his party during World War I.

He later joined the Victoria Police, where in thirteen years he never rose above the rank of a constable; he received reprimands for indecent assault and using excessive force against children.

Struggling financially, they spent the following two years moving around country Victoria, as his father managed pubs in Dromana, Drouin, and Mount Macedon.

[c] The magazine did not last long, and over the following years Curtin held down a series of short-term jobs, including as a copy boy at The Age, a potter's apprentice, and a houseboy at a gentlemen's club.

While a member of the Victorian Socialist Party Curtin held strong anti-imperialist and anti-militarist views, and in opposition to the mainstream of the Labor movement, opposed racism due to his belief that racial hatred was used as a tool of the "exploiting class".

During World War I he was a militant anti-conscriptionist; he was briefly imprisoned in December 1916 for refusing to attend a compulsory medical examination,[23] even though he knew he would fail the exam due to his very poor eyesight.

Re-elected in Labor's sweeping election victory the following year, he expected to be named as a member of Prime Minister James Scullin's Cabinet, but disapproval of his heavy drinking habit meant that he remained on the backbench.

[33] In 1941, Menzies travelled to Britain to discuss Australia's role in the war strategy, and to express concern at the reliability of Singapore's defences, only to be drawn into Winston Churchill's disastrous Greek campaign.

[35] Curtin had refused Menzies' initial offer to form a wartime "national government", partly because he feared that it would split the Labor Party, although he did agree to join the Advisory War Council.

He summoned Coles and Wilson and made them promise that if he named Curtin prime minister, they would support him for the remainder of the Parliament to end the instability in government.

On 28 December, the Sydney Daily Telegraph published a public statement of his government's new attitude: We look for a solid and impregnable barrier of the Democracies against the three Axis powers, and we refuse to accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate segment of the general conflict.

By that it is not meant that any one of the other theatres of war is of less importance than the Pacific, but that Australia asks for a concerted plan evoking the greatest strength at the Democracies' disposal, determined upon hurling Japan back.

We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go, and we shall exert all our energies towards the shaping of a plan, with the United States as its keystone, which will give to our country some confidence of being able to hold out until the tide of battle swings against the enemy.

Many felt that Prime Minister Curtin was abandoning Australia's traditional ties to the British Isles without any solid partnership in place with the United States.

[45] The Curtin government agreed that the Australian Army's I Corps – centred on the 6th and 7th Divisions – would be transferred from North Africa to the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command in the Netherlands East Indies for the defence of Java and Sumatra.

Multitudes of the finest lives of Australia, Britain, and America would have been saved; the long years of toil, death, and separation, which assuredly stretch ahead, would have been shortened.

"[52] Curtin formed a close working relationship with the Allied Supreme Commander in the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur.

[53] Biographer John Edwards wrote: A lesser Australian leader might have grated against MacArthur's vanity, cavilled at his assumption of command, contradicted his grandiloquent claims, satirised his manner.

In the election, Curtin led Labor to its greatest-ever victory, winning two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives on a two-party preferred vote of 58.2% and a 17-seat swing.

[78] Upon his death he was described by beacons of the local press to be a self-sacrificial casualty of war, a sentiment echoed by Presbyterian minister Hector Harrison.

[81] Harrison seemed to include Curtin among the Australian servicemen who had made the ultimate sacrifice:"His Calvary was the anguish of a man of peace who loathed war with all his heart and soul.

And yet who, by a strange irony of fate, was chosen by destiny to lead the nation in her hour of direst peril... when the hosts of the North came down like a mighty flood, confident in strength and exalted in victory, he did not shrink from the hazards of the conflict but threw himself into his work with an utter devotion which at length laid him low and at last called for the supreme sacrifice.

[80]Bearing his coffin from the King's Hall were Opposition Leader Robert Menzies, and former prime ministers Billy Hughes, Earle Page and James Scullin.

Fred Katz, an acquaintance from the Victorian Socialist Party, had taken Curtin to visit Elsie's father Abraham Needham, a candidate in the 1912 Tasmanian state election.

[95] On the day that Singapore fell, Curtin made time to speak at the re-consecration of a church, because, "The fatherhood of God was closely related to the brotherhood of man.

"[96] Near the end of his life, he asked his friend Hector Harrison, the Minister of the Presbyterian Church by Parliament, to conduct a Christian memorial service on his death.

[101] In 1942, uniform taxation was imposed on the various states,[102] which enabled the Curtin government to set up a far-reaching, federally administered range of social services.

"[104] Curtin defended the White Australia policy in a speech in which he stated: "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.

[114] On 14 August 2005, the 60th anniversary of V-P Day, a bronze statue of Curtin in front of Fremantle Town Hall was unveiled by Premier of Western Australia Geoff Gallop.