War

Negotiating tensions

Examining how Australia has gone to war

by Peter Edwards •

October 2022, no. 447

The War Game: Australian war leadership from Gallipoli to Iraq' by by David Horner

Allen & Unwin, $45 pb, 478 pp

War

Negotiating tensions

Examining how Australia has gone to war

by Peter Edwards •

October 2022, no. 447

General Thomas Blamey with Prime Minister John Curtin and Elsie Curtin, 1944 (National Library of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

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.

Peter Edwards

Peter Edwards is a historian specialising in Australia’s national security policies and policy-making. He is the Official Historian of Australia’s involvement in conflicts in Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam, for which he wrote Crises and Commitments (1992) and A Nation at War (1997). He is also the author of Arthur Tange: Last of the Mandarins (2006), Permanent Friends? Historical Reflections on the Australian–American Alliance (2005), and Prime Ministers and Diplomats (1983); the co-editor of Facing North (vol. 2, 2003); the editor of Defence Policy-Making (2008) and Australia Through American Eyes (1977); and a founding editor of the series of Documents on Australian Foreign Policy. His latest book is Law, Politics and Intelligence: A life of Robert Marsden Hope (2020).