Military History

Occasionally, a television series on history is accompanied by an excellent book. Jacob Bronowski, anchorman for The Ascent of Man (1973), produced a book of the same name, the more remarkable because it lucidly explained complicated topics in the history of science. John Kenneth Galbraith’s challenging and quietly amusing The Age of Uncertainty (1977) came from another BBC series. Now the history of the twentieth century – or essentially the first half of it – is told and interpreted in this fascinating book by Niall Ferguson, a talented British historian who is a professor at Harvard University.

While I was reading this book, news came that Peter Casserly, the last surviving digger who fought on the Western Front in World War I, had died, aged 107. Like Marcel Caux, who died in 2004, aged 105, Casserly always repudiated the Australian glorification of Gallipoli, refusing to participate in Anzac Day marches, join the RSL or even to talk about his wartime experiences. Yet after eighty-seven years of silence on the subject, Casserly had not forgotten the language that diggers used in 1917. The Sydney Morning Herald report of his death quoted from an interview he gave. ‘Another time Fritz derailed a train with English soldiers on board,’ he recollected, adding that, ‘Jerry was always trying to blow up the train with all its ammo.’ The soldiers’ terms to refer to their enemy, the Germans (or ‘the Hun’, as it pleased supporters of the conflict to say then), were Fritz, the pet-form of the common German given name Friedrich, and Jerry, an English pet-name that echoed the word German. Likewise, the Turks were called Abdul and Johnny Turk.

The name of Sir John Wilton would be unknown to the vast majority of the Australian public, to the defence community as a whole, and even, I suspect, to many of those now in the army. Such is the transitory nature of military prestige. David Horner’s biographical study seeks to correct this, and to explain the centrality of Wilton’s career to the development of Australian defence policy and operational deployment in the postwar period. This is more than a biography: while Wilton the man is not neglected, the emphasis is rather more on Wilton the professional, steadily climbing through the officer ranks in a series of appointments that culminated in his tenure as Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1966 to 1970.

Note especially the last word in the subtitle – ‘travel’. This book is not, or not chiefly, about strategy and battles. It is about getting to the war, or passing through an operational area and (with luck) getting home again; it is about visiting war cemeteries, battlefields and memorials, or revisiting them, sometimes decades later.

You may think this a wispy and slender thread upon which to string 350 pages of book. I thought so myself when I picked it up, and the misgiving recurred several times during the perusal. (Since a peacetime visit to Auschwitz is neither military nor Australian, Lily Brett’s piece seemed to have strayed in by mistake.) But the thread held – just – and I am grateful to the editors for teaching me much that I didn’t know, or had not understood.

For most Australians, certainly for those under the age of forty, ‘Vietnam’ is either an item on school curricula or a slightly off-the-beaten-path tourist destination. History or holiday. This may affront some, especially the small groups on either side of the 1960s cultural and political divide that cannot let go, but it is a sign of a generational shift and of the creation of the distance between ourselves and the event that is necessary for enhanced understanding and reconciliation between Australians and the Vietnamese.

Ever since Federation, Australians have heard of the Boer War, as they have heard of the Wars of the Roses. As to deep understanding, they have as much about the one war as about the other. As a ‘Matric’ student in 1939, I had for my Commercial Practice teacher a Boer War veteran – lean, tall, bowlegged – every schoolboy’s image of our horsemen who had taught the Empire’s enemies such a lesson in South Africa. Beguiled by eager juvenile diversionists, he would treat us to ten minutes of soldier anecdotes, straight from his saddle forty years earlier.

The title is not provocative: The Brisbane Line Controversy, but Paul Burns’s subtitle flags the partisanship that will mark his study. This is a case, he contends, of ‘Political Partisanship versus National Security 1942–45’. His conclusion is unobjectionable: ‘belief in a “Brisbane Line” was our barometer of fear about the vulnerability of our own continent which no Australian Army could negate’. In political demonology, the Brisbane Line signifies the intention of the Menzies–Fadden conservative governments of 1939–41 to abandon all but the south-east corner of Australia to the Japanese, should an invasion come. Burns is keen to absolve Menzies and his colleagues of blame and to find where, and with whom, the notion of the Line originated. In the process he indicts Labor front-bencher Eddie Ward, whose allegations about a Brisbane Line led to a Royal Commission in the election year of 1943.

The serious academic study of war has grown considerably in Australia in the last ten to fifteen years, bringing with it an often welcome diversification in focus and a willingness to subject old issues to fresh scrutiny. One sign of the increasing acceptance of war as a subject of serious study in the universities is the increasing number of university historians and other who, with little knowledge of or interest in the mechanics of war, nonetheless extend their work to include consideration of war and the military as these affect their particular areas of interest.

In a response to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli published in Quadrant in 1982, Gerard Henderson observed that ‘recounting the story of the Anzacs has become something of a growth industry’. Five years on, the Gallipoli industry shows no sign of a downturn. The salvaging and publication of war diaries, letters and manuscripts that had long mouldered in museums, libraries and attics, the spate of ‘epic’ teledramas and ersatz war fiction (like Jack Bennett’s spin-off from the aforesaid movie), new historical studies and the resurrection of old ones such as C. E. W. Bean’s Official History and, at the other end of the scale, John Laffin’s Digger: The story of the Australian soldier (its subtitle magically changed to ‘The legend of the Australian soldier’), all attest to the enduring appeal of Australia’s military exploits to writers and filmmakers and to the subject’s ability to tap a popular audience.