Military History

It is thirty-six years since the Australian National University Press published Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years; thirty-five since the unassuming Penguin paperback that became both a loved and critically acclaimed bestseller. Now Melbourne University Publishing has produced a deluxe, large-format, sombrely and evocatively illustrated edition. On the front cover is a Frank Hurley photograph of Australian troops crossing on duckboards a flooded field near the Menin Road in late October 1917. In the background stand stripped, gaunt, sentinel trees. Flip to the back cover and the image is of ‘A Young South Australian Patriot in 1916’. A cherub in uniform, he holds a toy rifle, in earnest for a conflict that, blessedly, will end before it is his turn to go.

It is ironic that I am writing this review on the tenth anniversary of the comprehensive defeat of the Republican referendum in 1999. This book by Craig Wilcox sets out to tell us that the British army (the Red Coats of the title) was much more popular in the colony than we had hitherto thought. Indeed, on the evidence, it was more popular in Australia than it ever was in Britain, which, even in the nineteenth century, had no love for standing armies.

With the sun’s morning rays glinting off their bayonets, the Australian soldiers rushed headlong towards the Italian fortress of Bardia in Libya. They sang as they advanced. Although there were isolated pockets of resistance, within hours the Australians had broken through the perimeter and Italian troops were beginning to surrender in their thousands. The capture of the supposedly ‘impenetrable’ fortress of Bardia in early January 1941 by the 6th Australian Infantry Division, fighting its first battle, was a major success that led to the capture of more than 40,000 Italian soldiers. The resounding victory by these sons of the original Anzacs was held to prove the inherent combat prowess of Australians. Major General Iven Mackay, the 6th Division’s commander, afterwards commented there was the notion ‘that the Australian is a born soldier and that, once given the weapons, he is alright’. Or so the myth goes.

War aims to achieve essentially political objectives through the use of organised violence. It is a tricky business because the means we try to use – the violence itself and the way we organise and inflict it – exert a powerful fascination which often overshadows the objectives we have set ourselves. We so easily focus on the fighting itself and forget why we are doing it. Afghanistan today shows how the resulting muddle can distort contemporary strategic choices. But it also affects our view of past wars, which matters because past wars so strongly shape the way we see ourselves today. We tell and retell the stories of our soldiers’ heroism and tragedy, but hardly consider what they were fighting to achieve. As a result, we come to see our military history as a series of heroic exploits shorn of strategic purpose, so that war’s violence and sacrifice becomes self-validating; an end in itself. Almost, as Peter Weir suggested, like a sport.

Do not be put off by this book’s bland title. In a country that has placed the Anzac Legend at the centre of its national identity, Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War is a profoundly subversive book. Cherished ideas of the Australian army as an egalitarian institution and of Australians as natural soldiers whose setbacks can always be blamed on the failings of others (generally the British or the Americans) are put to the test and found wanting. Those looking to have their strident assertions of Australian nationalism validated will be disappointed, but there are already plenty of other Australian military books that can satisfy them. Garth Pratten provides a portrait of Australians at war that is less heroic and more ambiguous, but ultimately more realistic because more human.

Much Australian writing about military subjects reminds me of the recent film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which started in adulthood and rapidly progressed into adolescence. From the evidence of this work, it is showing no signs of growing up. This book purports to have discovered an event about which Australians have remained deeply ignorant for the last ninety years: the charge of the Light Horse at Beersheba in the Middle Eastern war against the Ottoman Empire, in 1917. Only someone long exiled on a desert island could call this event ‘forgotten’. We have had a famous film about it (Forty Thousand Horsemen, 1940), a good book about the Light Horse by Alec Hill (1978), extensive work on the subject by Ian Jones, and a plethora of books by British historians about the Middle Eastern war that include this incident. The author, Paul Daley, must be one of the few Australians who had not heard of it. Is this reason enough to write a book about it? Possibly – but not this book.

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.

Our fascination with Gallipoli is probably at a peak. Like other symbolic events, it rises, falls and rises again in public esteem and curiosity. In the last quarter of a century, beginning when Anzac Day was at a low ebb, books and documentaries about Gallipoli have flooded bookshops and television stations. This new book by Professor Robin Prior, a specialist Australian historian of World War I, argues that the flood tide has almost drowned us in myths. The subtitle of his book is ‘The End of the Myth’. It is doubtful whether one able historian can terminate the myths, but this is a brave attempt.

According to Peter Rees’s introduction to The Other Anzacs, ‘at least 2498 nurses’ served overseas with the Australian Army Nursing Service during World War I, with about 720 in other units raised in Britain or privately sponsored. There were ‘at least 610 nurses’ in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service, and perhaps another 100 overseas. The criteria for acceptance were high. Nurses were required to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital, to be aged between twenty-one and forty, and either single or widowed. The rules about marriage, however, were not always strictly observed, and as men sometimes fudged their age and other circumstances to get into the army, occasionally a woman may have disguised her marital status. But once in the Army Nursing Service, marriage usually meant resignation. If a nurse wished to keep working after she married, she had to join one of the private medical or hospital services that had come into being.

It was a bright and bold idea of Graham Freudenberg to write a book on Winston Churchill and his long links with Australian political and military life. Though Churchill didn’t visit Australia – ‘wise man’, some said – he was a strong or even decisive influence at several turning points in our history and indeed our mythology.

Churchill exerted influence here long before 1940, when he became Britain’s prime minister. He sparred with Alfred Deakin in London in 1907; he was the political mastermind behind the Gallipoli landing in World War I; and in 1921 he helped to throttle the renewal of the nineteen-year-old Anglo-Japanese naval alliance. In the 1920s he delayed, for valid financial and strategic reasons, the creation at Singapore of a naval base intended to be Australia’s front-line defence against Japan in the next world war. He was a lonely giant in defying Hitler in that terrible year of 1940; and in the following years he clashed with Australia’s prime minister, John Curtin, on vital strategic questions.