Commentary On Sept. 3, 1939, the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, broadcasted the following message: “Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.” Most readers today were born long after these words were spoken, but it takes little imagination to share in our minds something of the dread they conveyed to a people who still vividly remembered the awful losses of World War I that had ended only 20 years before. “It’s all happening again,” they thought as they prepared their minds for the deprivations and the deaths that they knew in their hearts were bound to follow. Humans always hope, of course, but the prospect of peace by Christmas was a forlorn one. The troops who …