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Military History

Of the fate of Australian prisoners of war in the hands of the Japanese during World War II, the literature – memoir, fiction, history – is voluminous. There were 21,652 of them, of whom thirty-five per cent, or 7780, perished. A good deal has also been written of enemy prisoners – Japanese, German, Italian – who were held in camps in this country, and in pa ...

Witnesses to War, an ambitious book, is part of a larger project by the C.E.W. Bean Foundation to commemorate the work of Australian war correspondents. Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, setting out to document the performance of Australian war correspondents, have tackled complex material. They deal with an enormous cast of characters and various interwoven themes, including the struggle against military censorship, how journalists have observed their duty to neutral coverage (or not), and the changing technology of reporting war – from sending stories by carrier pigeon or steamship in World War I to today’s live telecasts by journalists direct from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. The book fills an important gap. Until now, Phillip Knightley’s more general work, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker (1975, 2004), has served as the final authority in this field. Knightley is a patron of the Foundation and an important influence.

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The title of this new book on the Vietnam War comes from the final verse cycle of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1869). As Arthur lies dying, he reflects ‘that we / Shall never more ... Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds’. This Arthurian borrowing for the title of a book about an obscure battle fought by Australians in Vietnam during the 19 ...

Gallipoli: A Short History by Michael McKernan & Pozières: The Anzac Story by Scott Bennett

by
May 2011, no. 331

Michael McKernan states in his introduction to his short book on Gallipoli that he is dissatisfied with much writing on military history. He writes: ‘Military history is often presented as a thing of maps and statistics, a brutal narrative based on the deployments and motives of commanders with a score sheet of those who performed well and those who failed. In this book I have tried to go beyond that ... to show that somewhere for each life lost, there was long mourning and deep grief.'

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While explorations of Australia at war have never been short on ‘male stories’, the prevalence of the masculine frame may yet increase in coming years as part of the ongoing examination of competing forms of manhood in this country, as evidenced by the upcoming symposium ‘Embattled Men: Masculinity and War’ at the Australian National University. The publicit ...

‘A peculiar bloke, Jack; you never knew him. You couldn’t get close to him.’ Reg Pollard, who was one of the abler members of the Labor Caucus in the 1940s, confessed his puzzlement to Lloyd Ross as Curtin’s biographer gathered personal testimony ...

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In September last year the impressive military intellectual David Kilcullen gave the prestigious annual ‘University Lecture’ to the assembled cohort of cadets, midshipmen, officers, academic staff and senior leadership of the Australian Defence Force Academy and its partner institution, the University of New South Wales. I was especially struck by Kilcullen’s argument, to the young officer trainees, that their future responsibilities would be important because war and conflict had been perennial features of human society since ancient times, and would persist despite efforts to create a more peaceful world. Was this, I wondered, the only way to impress upon the future leadership of the ADF the seriousness of their calling?

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Late in 1944 Richard Turner was at last able to come home. A Sydney taxi driver, he had been captured in Greece in June 1941. Like 2,000 other Australians, he missed the last boats to leave. Though captured by the Germans, he soon escaped to join the andartes – partisans fighting the Germans in Greece’s rugged interior. With the Germans pulling out, British officers managed to contact Richard and he was finally able to leave for home after nearly five years. On 17 December 1944 the lorry taking Richard to Athens airport accidentally drove into one of the first firefights of the Greek civil war. Richard now lies in the beautiful war cemetery at Phalereon, an oasis of peace amid the traffic that chokes Athens.

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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.

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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.

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