David Horner

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.

At first sight, the title of David Horner’s new book, The War Game, is an uncharacteristically flippant reference by a serious historian to a deadly serious business. Horner has taken the term from writers such as Jonathan Swift and Horace Walpole, who saw war being treated as a game in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The carnage of the industrial-scale wars of the twentieth century, with their current reverberations in Ukraine, makes the phrase seem almost offensive, as does the frightening prospect of a full-scale war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

In the interests of national security, my luggage was recently searched at Los Angeles airport. The culprit: Spy Catchers. The uncorrected proof copy was so bulky that it triggered an alert. I declined to tell the Customs and Border Protection officer (in no mood for irony) that one chapter in the offending item was entitled ‘Keeping out Undesirables’. David Horner’s first volume in the history of ASIO is a big book – big on detail, broad in scope, and, overall, impressive in achievement.

In 1966 as a young first-year cadet at the Royal Military College, I purchased Anzac to Amiens by C.E.W. Bean, which had been published twenty years earlier. Bean had been Australia’s Official Historian for World War I, and Anzac to Amiens was his masterly condensation of the twelve-volume official history of which he had been the general editor and principal author. It was to be many years before I purchased the twelve volumes or could find time and commitment to read them. In the meantime, Anzac to Amiens was my guide to the history of Australia’s involvement in the war. I still refer to it.

When the United States recently announced its commitment to enforce a ‘no-fly zone’ in Libya, the State Department spokesman was asked whether the United States was now at war. He could only manage a floundering non-answer. The unfortunate spokesman’s difficulty with this apparently simple question is a reminder of the vast changes in the nature of military conflict in recent decades. Major conflicts are seldom a matter of one state formally declaring war on another, with a largely agreed set of rules on the conduct of operations (sometimes flouted in horrific ways) and with some generally accepted markers of victory and defeat.

The recent, sometimes heated, debate among policy experts and commentators about Australia’s Defence White Paper has helped give focus to a curious paradox: that for the last two decades or so, since the release of the Defence of Australia White Paper in 1987, there has been a profound disconnection between defence planning and procurement and the actual operations conducted by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). With its focus on major new spending commitments on submarines, frigates and the Joint Strike Fighter in the midst of ongoing operations in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands – which require none of these big-ticket items but which have, at times, stretched the ADF’s deployable capacity – the present White Paper risks falling into the same trap.

This excellent new volume, a product of the Australian War Memorial’s major research project on the history of Australian peacekeeping, provides a stirring corrective to this enduring paradox. Peacekeeping, its editors argue and contributors demonstrate, is a distinctive military activity that requires special skills, resources and equipment. It is always complex, and sometimes highly dangerous.

In his famous but tendentious 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that ‘we may be witnessing ... not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history’. A similar proposition might well have been made about Australian military history. By 1989 the great era of Australian military history seemed to have passed. The centrepieces of this era were the two world wars, which were so large, bloody and traumatic that they seemed destined to dominate the subject for many decades to come. What came before – the New Zealand Wars, Sudan, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Boer War – were seen as preliminary or preparatory episodes, or, as the title of one book on Sudan put it, ‘The Rehearsal’. The conflicts that followed World War II were postscripts. The performances and sacrifices of Australians in Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam were measured against the earlier experiences of the world wars. All of Australia’s senior commanders in Vietnam had served in World War II, while most of the younger fighters there were the sons of World War II veterans.

Not many Australian historians have managed to publish major books, based on years of scholarly research, which have evoked both immediate and enduring acclaim. It therefore says something both about intrinsic value and about the tastes of the book-buying public when such a book goes into a second or even a third edition, ten or more years after its first appearance. The weeks preceding Anzac Day are always a popular time for the publication of books on military history, but this year has been especially notable for witnessing a number of reissues, alongside a flood of new titles. The two under review here are the third edition of Jeffrey Grey’s A Military History of Australia, and the second edition of David Horner’s and Jean Bou’s history of the Royal Australian Regiment, Duty First. Others include the third edition of Ken Inglis’s highly acclaimed study of war memorials, Sacred Places, and new issues of Ross McMullin’s biography of Major General ‘Pompey’ Elliott and Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese.

Breaking The Codes was published last August. The time that has subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.